Manuel A. Melendez
Ride a White Swan
Dover, NJ | 2001
I was dancing when I was twelve
I was dancing when I was twelve
Jamie Bell appearing in and out of the camera’s frame as he jumps
and dashes madly upward, his fourteen-year-old smile all milk and joy
(behind him: a cacophonous wallpaper, a mush of mustard yellow and pea soup green):
shots of his hairless armpits, his boyish calves, his scuffed black sneakers, his well-worn
white socks, the moles emerging from underneath an elbow or the peak of his neckline,
his yellow tank top and short shorts (a burst of dark green with red piping) to accent
the lines of his thighs as he shakes them— finally,
a full body shot
as he turns his head dramatically to our right: the movie title blinking on
in front of the wallpaper
its repeating pattern: an abstract sunflower in bloom.
This is Billy Elliot.
This is Billy—putting on his older brother’s ratty vinyl of T. Rex’s Electric Warrior before jumping on his bed in County Durham, in Northeast England, during the 1984–1985 miners’ strike.
So begins my life as a teen.
Yes, this will have everything to do with my father.
I was enraptured from the first shot of Jamie Bell as Billy in the trailer*:
As the Rocky theme begins to play, Billy commences a strange dance around his sparring partner, his fancy footwork landing him a punch straight to his cheek. Knocked out, the trailer fades to black and T. Rex’s “I Love to Boogie” begins to play over a shot of young girls in tutus practicing over a barre before Billy comes into view, navy blue boxing boots inching toward them, watching with barely concealed curiosity. Cut to a shot of the girls’ ballet slippers as they practice first position before revealing Billy’s boots, bulky in that sea of white, stomping the ground in imitation of the girls. Cut to the obligatory montage of failed pirouette practices** spliced in with the expected masculine fear of ballet from Billy’s father—spat out like a slur and an indictment—before landing ever so gently on Billy successfully completing the pirouette. In slow-motion, of course.
I was pulverized.
Like a slab of marble shattering to recompose itself again—that is how it reached me—receiving an answer to the loneliness that had been gradually creeping in. Twenty-five years removed now from my forest green bedroom—what strikes me most is the doubling of Billy Elliot in my life. How, not unlike that initial pirouette from the trailer casting its spell on impressionable me, I can now retrieve the other side of the turn— this is not just the story of Billy and me, but Billy and my father—the man my father sacrificed while performing the role of my father—a being independent and still wholly conjoined to who he was (and is) as his own man.
As a child, even one prone to introspection and observation, it was a struggle to behold my father as anything but. This, as it turned out, was also a problem for him when presented with any notion of me not as the boy he was raising but as the boy who’d grow up and affirm he had always been his own self, often in ways that astounded or wounded him—even when I was (or thought I was) being so careful. My father was the man who could pack severity in four syllables or less—what his bulging eyes could deliver without ever having to speak the dreaded, “Wait till we get home.” It is momentous—that first glimmer from inside another human being that signals to you they exist entirely outside of you, carrying their worlds within—worlds that will not always be visible to even those they adore, and even if then, only gradually revealed through the thick curtains of time passed—both selves unprepared to put to language even a partial history of fathers and their sons when they know they are too much
apart and yet
too much of each other.
Consider, Billy and his father don’t quite see eye to eye.
Every movement Billy made seemed to be only for more reproaches or consternation from his father. Worse—the absence of Billy’s mother haunts not just Billy and his father as a literal ghostly presence but also in the spoken ways Billy acknowledges how different both of his parents are in their treatment of him.
Early on in the film, as Billy attempts to play the same five notes on a piano (a recurring musical motif in the score), his father tells him to “leave it.” Billy does at first, but in a surreptitious move I would recognize in my own testy limits pushing with my father, he mumbles back, “Mum would’ve let us.”
Without acknowledging his father, not even a glance in his direction, Billy has struck him. Billy’s father promptly closes the piano lid as his son withdraws his fingers from the keys.
My mother and father spent most of my childhood working opposite schedules—my father the day shift and my mother the night, meeting momentarily only during dinner. That my father chose that table, on a weekday or weekend of his choosing, to orchestrate a spectacle—the enumeration of disappointments in my body growth, in my study skills, in my hygiene—in all of this, my mother witness to the winnowing of my appetite to speak—to even defend myself. How to swallow your father’s expectations with black beans and rice.
Years later, during more dinner theater, I will look my father right in the eyes and say, “No one will ever have an ego bigger than yours.” The form faces take in the nanosecond move from a smile to a frown. The first glancing blow.
This moment was emblematic of me and my father during this period. The inarticulate but loaded eyeless communication, the tension coiling. But most of all—the mother. Mine and Billy’s. Both conduits for the father’s soon-to-be-expressed outrage. There’s an admirable kind of audacity for a father, brazen in his beliefs, to presume that the mother of their shared child has chosen to side with that son in any way, much less in every way. But this was the piano lid closing every argument we had then—my mother and me plotting to cast my father out from every conversation, every morsel of knowing, that he would’ve otherwise enjoyed.
“I know you’re siding with your mother! To make me the villain!”
The more mystified I became at his sour, angry tones, the more my father doubled down on his paranoid understanding of my mother and me as accomplices working to expel him from some inner circle that never existed. He was confusing my bafflement for retaliation. But I did not have the syntax to nudge him toward the truth—my mother did not really know more of me than he did, not even then, when his bullish wrecking over our dining room table would harden time right down to an unbearable freeze. Even cutlery ceased to clink.
Sowing estrangement seeds is often an invisible act, prone to involuntary moves that nevertheless prove strategic. What my father kept confirming for himself as deliberate, my rejection or dismissal of him—was more my amazement at his actions. At the sneer that licked his upper lip when he caught me moving in a way he did not like. At the sharpened rise of his booming voice whenever he declared, “I’m not shouting!” At the deepening silence of our house before and after his arrival every afternoon from work—the form this silence took: thick and meaty, the suspect whiff of rot, cloying and tart. Unbearable.
The trepidation I kept for thoughts about my father, or the images of him walking toward the front door and opening the house at the end of a day, began to cancel out sweetness. As much as he startled me, so did my need to protect myself from him stifle my confidence. Better to find other ways to speak than with my voice—but what is left without it? Sure enough, now I know that my voice was all I’d ever need to fight back.
Consider Billy’s first proper rehearsal, as he shouts to Mrs. Wilkinson, his ballet teacher, “I don’t know what to do!” As if I had nudged Billy myself to voice my ineptitude in navigating the quaking ground on which my father and I stood. Or navigating my first month in Boonton, New Jersey, in School Street Elementary, attempting to piece the English language together in that carnival of my peers’ laughter and the dazing classrooms full of garish color and sound. Or my father again: displeased at yet another failure, another missed mark of mine. Would that I could go back now and nudge Billy with a shoulder, promise him that all we’ll need soon enough is John Keats. But the blows had to come first, didn’t they? Translated from hugs. Translated now, as I began to speak English first, not second—just in time to realize how much my father and I were beginning to stray from each other.
Consider my father as a young man, and my father as my father, and the kind of ache that comes with realizing that he was, simultaneously, both Billy and his father—the boy who dreams and the man who wants to fight it out of him. Only now, as I write this, do I see that the transformation travels both ways.
When my father divulged to Mima, his mother (who was not his mother but rather his mother’s sister***), that he wanted to dance ballet, the shutdown of this was as comprehensive as it was banal. Clichéd.
“Ballet is for sissies.”
What was this but the future echo of Billy’s father pronouncing, “Lads do football or—boxing or—wrestling, not—friggin’ ballet,” each sport he names spat out like a fireball hardening and clotting inside his mouth.
In all the self-centeredness of being twelve, it did not occur to me that my father had been that boy, too, dancing to refuse the erasure of his future, but that somehow, along the way, he had mistaken fatherhood for severity and the administration of cataloged pathologies on how to be a man, on how to be the perfect son—on how to be perfect.
At twelve, however, I was not as willing to forgive. I was deeply enmeshed in newfound disdain for anything that might warm me up to my father’s way of thinking—indeed, to anything that would allow me to think of him as imperfect—as the fallible man he was (and is). To think of Billy in his ballet rehearsal, suddenly petrified at the sight of his father watching him, having finally caught on to what he’d been doing for weeks now, missing his boxing practices, behaving, as my father would agree, quite suspect. Hiding something. And Billy’s delicate fingers, squeezing the sides of his blue shorts, his distress at being caught, at having no way out—was this not proof enough of some desperate ploy to conceal? How many times did I need something to squeeze—waiting for my father after school, a report card with a B+ soiling the inside of my backpack as I flailed in my attempts to distract myself from the bellows I was already composing in my head—all in my father’s formidable alto.
Cut to the kitchen table at Billy’s home. Billy’s father is incredulous at what he’s seen, and Billy attempts to explain himself. But how do we explain what is innately us? What gives us such life that it can no longer be distinguishable from the molecules sustaining us? “Who do you think I am? You know quite nicely!” shouts Billy’s father, and it is my father shouting it back to me, all of the variants of this tidy microcosm of our new relationship—how we live now. Perhaps all fathers are most afraid of losing their boys when they are most in proximity to anything that might taint their boyishness and lure it into sissiness. Once more the tired battle of what makes a man a man. Billy’s father would learn, as would mine, that neither Billy nor I were ever going to cede the ground to this conundrum—this ‘problem’ of gayness, which must have been so explicit in me even as a sixth-grader that my father mistook it for rebellion.
Consider, Michael, Billy’s only friend, a dark-haired and gangly (almost waif-looking) boy, refusing to enter the boxing hall to watch Billy be “crap at boxing.”
Consider—Michael is in love with Billy.
Billy understands just how much after a miserable Christmas— the mining strike still in full effect, Billy’s father is forced to destroy his wife’s piano to make wood for fire, to keep them warm. Billy watches all of this, huddling in on himself and his hand-me- downs, hearing his father sob with every swing of the ax.
Making a snowman out in front of the boxing hall, Billy comments on his freezing hands. Michael grabs them and places them inside his own jacket.
Billy waits a beat before asking, bewildered, “What are you doing?” before Michael responds with, “Just warming your hands up.”
The matter-of-factness in this sincerity coexists with the now observable desire for Billy in Michael’s eyes—both things are true here: he sees his friend in need, and he wants his friend to need him****.
It doesn’t matter that Billy asks Michael if he’s a poof***** with the lilt of innocence in his timbre, nor does it matter that Michael asks, quietly, performatively bewildered, “What gave you that impression?” We know he is, as does Billy (Jamie Bell’s face already a master class in revealing), and with all the hardship his family endures, the callous abuse his father projects onto him, the starkness of finding out that he loves a thing (ballet) that cannot endure in the world of masculinity that maintains his small mining town—all of this has made it possible for Michael to press a quick peck on his cheek.
After a carefully measured beat, this is the dialogue Billy and Michael exchange:
“Just ‘cause I like ballet—doesn’t mean I’m a poof, you know.”
“You won’t tell anyone, will ya?”
Silence. And then resplendence.
Measure that silence and its initial severity in every face you’ve looked into after they learn of your gayness.
Measure it in Jamie Bell’s crinkling eyes as he smiles, beckoning Michael inside the boxing hall with a simple,
“Come on******.”
I rewound this scene countless times. Sometimes, I’d end the movie there, the perfect spot to pause and invent the rest. Sometimes, I’d just watch this scene—I’d put myself in it, as Michael or as Billy, envisioning the cold hands inside my jacket, or the warmth of the jacket around my hands, the stiff parchment of wintry air filling in the hollowness of a miserable Christmas Eve. The thoughtfulness of two boys understanding one another, and of one accepting the other’s desire while acknowledging its impossible completion—it was all-consuming. And all this before I could articulate the thinking already happening inside my brain. To find such a moment in my living would be special, indeed, but could it ever be attainable?
This thought that I could somehow live inside a film’s solitary scene, capture myself in a dream strangers dolled up for me, every prescribed desire accounted for, it was an intoxicating and dangerous threshold: to escape into it, write the never-ending story of my choosing, or find a balance—somehow—between the real I wanted to grasp less of and the unreality I knew (deep, deep down that well of longing—I knew) would never sustain me or bring me out of my loneliness while learning the ruptures I was making between the once-easy path between my father and I—or back to eight-year-old-me, still flying across every room carried by his father’s arms.
Consider, my father, as a young man, wanting to be a ballet dancer.
Classic case of dramatic irony: Billy Elliot entering my life as the divergence between my father and me began in earnest.
Aggressive periods of dissent.
The always evident scowl at my actions or decisions.
A slow-forged barrier reinforced between us.
I’d look up at him, side-eyeing me or actively observing me, say, at the dinner table, or on a car ride to the Rockaway Mall, and I could see gears of paranoia turning inside of him. Who is this child? Is this my son? What was he trying to work out?
An affliction, like a sharpened stem, curling around our family.
A wall of thorns to prick and jar us.
An unpredictable rumble of dark moods. Then: a red eruption.
Staggering— a cavernous center of gravity
pulling us further into
the event horizon.
But I know now how much he struggled to fight that overwhelming
maw—
in that nondescript sports clothing store where I implored him I
needed to buy running tights for my track and field practices.
In his face, how I could detect the traces of a man, stacked against that
rack of black and gray spandex, that wanted to tell me I did not need to
run one hundred or two hundred meter sprints to prove a point. I
never needed
to run at all.
He never attended a single meet, and when I quit track without any
fanfare (much as I had entered it) we never spoke of it again********.
Let’s return now to Billy as he enters the boxing ring. Knowing Michael’s secret, Billy can now freely indulge it without patronizing its tender crux—by throwing a tutu to Michael so he can put it on********, it isn’t just friendly ribbing, but a respect of this newly learned fact of self. Nothing has changed between them, and now Billy can quit pretending he isn’t in love with what he’s doing.
Cue gentleness—Billy adjusting Michael’s arms to first position********* and guiding his shoulders until they drop and they can begin an impromptu warm-up—the plié.
Cue the arrival of the boxing hall owner, his distress at what he’s seeing, and his rush to Billy’s father, head down in misery just outside the hall.
Cue euphoria—Billy hanging from a thick rope as Michael leads him in circles, giggles erupting from them both—the pure mirth of found time with someone you no longer have to explain yourself to.
Cue Billy’s father, eyes disbelieving the sight of his son tap dancing for Michael, still wearing his tutu.
Cue Michael removing his tutu the instant Billy’s father turns to him.
Metaphors wish they could be that
succinct in meaning.
What’s left now is Billy and his father— terror under an open sky of defiance. Billy fixes his eyes on his father and starts the dance anew, no, renewed— speaking everything that Billy knows could shut the door between him and his father more decidedly than before.
I know about sacrifice in that way Billy does—to watch your father give up one more thing so you don’t have to. But the emotional weight of all of this at the specific juncture of Billy Elliot in which it appears—in an awkwardly staged and rushed tear-laden plea, having betrayed the striking miners to cross the picket line and return to work, imploring all that Billy may be a genius and deserves his shot at ballet.
That has yet to land in the intended manner, twenty-five years on and counting. I questioned this moment of revelation needing to be so treacly, so rattling in its spilling-over sentimentality.
If my father instructed me in anything by the year 2000, it was that overt displays of emotion were not wanted. Not by him and not by society. Not by men and least of all by the boys who’d become them. He was silently guiding me toward a dryness; a stoic and clinical façade I could use to displace expectations he wanted me to keep subverting. He knew then he could not undo me, nor did he ever expect to—but through the harsh judgment of my moves or voice, my father was at- tempting to translate me for himself: my son, a likely homosexual, needs to bury that. As if I could bury the fact of gayness inside a mine somewhere—yes, it was that much of a mallet over the head.
I flinched at any display of emotion from my father, and as he drew away from this flinching, questioning how I had become so dry, I despised Billy’s father and his tears—the hypocrisy to even ask, to presume that I had not taken the lessons to heart and snuffed what warmth had been lingering from any affection my father and I shared. More starkly: what bothered me most about Billy’s father in this messy scene is what embarrassed me about my own. The unconvincing sobs and overwrought dialogue outside the Durham mines—it was everything my father taught me, through action, to avoid.
Any time he’d revert to my “dad,” the agreeable, amiable companion who’d carry me over his shoulders or fly me into a bathtub or let me squeeze him in a hug, I would now reject him, disbelieving he’d attempt to relocate us as that portrait of father with son. I no longer believed it; I could no longer see anything but our relationship of shunning silences—in that same way I did not (and do not) believe the scene in Billy Elliot.
It was an unearned catharsis and yet there Billy’s father was, sobbing, pleading that Billy deserves a chance at happiness.
Where was my father’s plea for me?
As it turns out, it was all in action. My father—walking the miles to and from McDonald’s, his first job as an American, acquired days after we arrived in New Jersey during the blizzard of ’96. In that blistering nor’easter, we voyaged up the coast, and the first thing my father did was find a job. Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice.
Every afternoon, arriving in a daze from the overstimulation of school, as uncertain and ungraspable as English, I knew that there would be a Happy Meal waiting for me. No overture, no grand act—just the meal itself. The silent but fervent artifact of the sacrifice being made.
But what if someone in my father’s life had told him, as Mrs. Wilkinson tells Billy, “you’re good enough to go for it.” She knows Billy will eclipse her in raw talent, but he doesn’t know how to build himself up yet, how to strap into the confidence of experience. He is just beginning, and she has long known there is nothing but a boxing hall and a parade of girls in slippers in her horizon. If my father had met his Mrs. Wilkinson then, would he have been quicker to kindness or encouragement, and learned to dole out these in ways that did not require decoding or arrived secondhand, almost accidentally, as if my father forgot, just in that instance, that he had meant to criticize me instead of inspiring?
It is only in the writing of this right now that another, likely more final, thought occurs to me:
Was my father preparing me to surpass him all along?
Did he shun my track tights and meets because he knew, so fastidiously, they would never shape the fabric of my dream? Did he gaze at me over those dinner-table tantrums and lord over so much venom because he was pushing down his own need to express, to be artistic, to be what I did not know I was being (no, not then)? Did he shove a tender thought or caress to stifle my softness—to harden me as he did? Did he—did he—did he—
Did he know, then, I would get to taste freedom as text, as body, as memory—as the sacrifice fathers make?
And when we sacrifice, when we are so bereft, what then? What becomes of the father?
* * *
Hialeah, FL | 2025
Most evenings, before dinnertime, when I’m visiting home, I’ll hear Swan Lake coming from my dad’s study—the thirty-two Fouettés*********, perhaps the most iconic step in all of ballet history. Does my dad imagine himself dancing it, or is he content now just to watch, to rewind and rewind, to fill himself up this way with dreaming? I imagine him riding each fouetté, its whipping motion a clock unwound, unbound to itself, and in this way, able to take him back as far as he dares that specific night—hands twirling, legs in a perfect spin (perfect, perfect, as he so often urged me), as if all life can be is desiring that does not know a place, or form, that is shapeless even as it shapes itself into a white swan.
The pleasure I derive now from knowing my dad through his obsessive routines, his Pavlovian treats, is akin to learning a secret but truly knowing it as a secret—in the sharing of the word here on a page, what it reveals is not the thing itself but that a moment thought to be lost is reshared and recompiled for me—occluded from your view but visible to the innermost untouched me. An inscrutable melody not meant for you outside of its communicating that a dad and a son, perhaps, have always been in conversation with one another—have learned to live in that silence between questions still left to ask and answers not prepared to receive.
Cue Billy and his father, at the train station, in their embrace:
Billy accepted into the Royal Ballet School, his father’s arms bolstering Billy from under his thighs, raising him high up, squeezing him tight.
An act of simultaneous acceptance and release.
My dad and I had no such embrace in 2000 but through this extrication what remains unspoken is no longer—the transference that made both Billy, in his defiant dance, and his father, in his witnessing of his son’s gift, perfect mirrors for my dad: one through his refusal to back down from his dreams, and the other from his silent but insistent acquiescence that his son’s journey is no longer his to control, but to behold. The more he kept pushing, the less my dad held anything to do with me, and so it was up to the art—to the vestiges of what we consumed together or alone—to bring us together toward any possible embracing of the other. We are not making a movie, not now nor then, but the sentimental education remains the same, is translated into that instantly recognizable swell from Swan Lake’s “Scène,” the Swan Theme, and in music, in that solitary dance of Billy’s where he wills his father to see and believe him, in that is where I laid the first movement of my forgiving—of accepting I could, eventually, learn to forgive my dad for bringing in so much torment, for subjecting me to his cold, unreadable gazes.
My father is always late to dinner when the thirty-two Fouettés plays, and I’ve never dared disrupt him then—our first embrace: my unspoken understanding of this symmetry inside the man responsible for bringing me to life. For what else is Swan Lake but the tale of a cursed being fated to only ever be themselves for a few hours of the night?
See, in this act, how my dad becomes both Billy and Billy’s father, and by doing so—
Billy leaps into the air, a grand jeté
& his father gasps, a pool of tears in his eyes,
the wallpaper from the opening credits fading
back into view—
The Swan frozen in frame giving way to Billy as a boy,
T. Rex returning, encouraging us all
to ride a white swan.
*I saw it for the first time on my favorite E! show, Coming Attractions!, where Todd Newton, our geeky-hunky host, would screen movie trailers for upcoming movies. It lasted thirty minutes with commercials, and it was my go-to for the latest on the cinematic calendar. I always made sure to have a VHS ready to record in case a particular preview piqued my interest.
** For comedic effect, punctuated by T. Rex’s glam rock groove, with the most effective shot that of Billy emerging, soaking wet in his school uniform, after collapsing into the off-frame bathtub.
***More on the Byzantine layers of my father’s family tree later.
****I’ve carried this balance with me my entire life. Into all of the tenderness I’ve pulled from other boys—the tenderness I’ve allowed myself to accept.
*****British pejorative for a gay person.
****** The last time Billy and Michael share the screen in Billy Elliot, Billy is departing for the Royal Ballet School. After some shyness, he gives Michael a peck on the cheek, and with that same resplendent smile, bids him farewell with a “See ya, then.” The sublime construction of a goodbye.
******* It remains the only time he and I ever communicated sports to one another. And as for the spandex—it still lives in a bedroom drawer in my parents’ house.
********This is actually not the first moment where Michael puts on clothing typically ‘assigned’ to a female. Earlier in the film, Michael answers the door in his sister’s dress. Once inside, he puts on her lipstick and then does the same to Billy, who acquiesces without a word. It is never brought up again.
********* In ballet, this means the feet are placed with the heels together and the toes facing outward, while the hands are rounded in front of the body, forming an oval shape as the palms face the chest with all fingers curved together.
**********As glorious as anything art can ever create. A testament to the body and its wonders. Its resilience.
Manuel A. Melendez is a Pushcart-nominated hybrid writer born and partially raised in Camagüey, Cuba.