All-male dance revue raises policy questions

Six days after a trio of male dancers shimmied into the Rathskellar, University administrators are still piecing together how the event was allowed to take place.

About 100 students, including members of the Duke Gay, Bisexual and Lesbian Association who protested the evening's "ladies only" billing as discriminatory, attended the hour-long revue, which featured a variety of costumes, dance moves and g-strings.

Around campus and among administrators, the incident has raised a variety of questions, including whether the University should allow erotic dancers on campus, why The Underground dance club, which sponsored the event, could host the performance when University policy forbids student groups to sponsor strippers, and why protest was so muted when a female strip show would have prompted what one student called "a hissy fit."

Linda Studer-Ellis, assistant dean of University life and one of two deans who attended the show, says the event should have been vetoed. "What I saw there was beyond the outer limits," Studer-Ellis said, describing an instance when a member of the audience was invited onto the stage, handcuffed to a chair and caressed by a machine-gun wielding dancer who asked her whether she fantasized about being overpowered by a male.

"We are crossing lines here when we are handcuffing our students to chairs and asking them if they are not sexually stimulated by it," Studer-Ellis said.

But Trinity sophomore Sydney Partin said she didn't have a problem with the show. "I had a great time," Partin said. "It was disgusting, but it was fun."

Underground Manager Rick Owen, a manager for Bryan Center dining and special events, helped organize the event and supported the idea from the beginning.

"It's an alternative [type] of entertainment that goes on in the outside world--no one's forcing them to go," Owen said. "The University did not necessarily OK or promote this, but the undergraduate students wanted something different--they wanted to push the edge of the envelope, and that's what they were attempting to accomplish with this."

So how did The Underground get approval to host a male dance revue? One reason may be because the club does not register its events with the Event Advising Center, the group responsible for reviewing student-run programs that include alcohol.

Instead, Underground programming falls under the auspices of dining and special events, a division of auxiliary services.

"The uniqueness of this is that a student group merged a consistent program into a public-use facility," said Joe Pietrantoni, associate vice president for auxiliary services. "When they merged, not a lot of the fine-tooth policies were fit together."

Pietrantoni said he will meet with student affairs administrators this summer to resolve the policy problem.

The club's plan to host a male dance revue did catch the attention of some, however--Thursday, a law student sent a letter to top University officials protesting the event's "ladies only" billing.

In a series of discussions that day, administrators decided to open the event to men because the women-only limitation violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Yet even though e-mail and faxes protesting the show reached administrative offices as high as President Nan Keohane's, no one canceled the event.

Keohane said she had not known about the no-stripper policy when she heard about Thursday's event.

And when the Title IX issue reached Pietrantoni's desk late Thursday afternoon, "It was titled a `male dance group,'" he said. "I didn't put any more thought into it than that."

Members of the Office of Student Affairs, including Studer-Ellis and Bumbalough, were less sanguine.

"Earlier in the week, we'd been approached and we threw up all kinds of red flags," Studer-Ellis said.

And although Janet Dickerson, vice president for student affairs, said she was asked to cancel the event Thursday, she "did not feel that was the right response at that time," she said. "The deans were much more skeptical than I was about the nature of the event. They were right, I now acknowledge; but I was told that the planners of the event were very certain that the dancing would be `in good taste.' They insisted that they were not strippers."

Said Owen: "No one said we could do it, but no one said we could not do it either... From what I understand, as of Thursday morning, Janet Dickerson was still OK with it."

Even after the performance, Underground managers weren't sure baring everything but a g-string qualified as stripping.

"That's kind of a personal definition of it," Antorcha said. "Some people might call them strippers, some people might call them male dancers. They didn't get naked."

While Owen said that no one intended to break a policy, Studer-Ellis countered that intent is not the issue. "It doesn't matter to me--programmers on campus are responsible for program content, and ignorance is not an acceptable excuse."

Neither Owen nor any of the student managers had seen a preview video of the group last Monday, when they booked them for the Thursday night event.

In retrospect, said Owens, "Their performance went further than I had anticipated."

Strippers or otherwise, a number of students questioned how the campus might have reacted had women danced for a "men's night" at The Underground.

Lunching at Burger King Tuesday, Trinity junior Tracy Thomas threw out a possible explanation for the double standard. "It's because it's a sexist society--because women are always subject to things like this," she said.

Added Trinity junior Jason Hamilton: "It's hypocrisy, feminism and apathy in the male movement," he said, elaborating that "men don't stick up for their rights because their rights are already protected."

Part of the distinction may stem from the differing connotations of male and female dance performances.

"The power dimension is different when male dancers are dancing--it's a sort of reversal that's almost playful or silly, because we know men don't have to make their way as dancers," said Jean O'Barr, chair of the Women's Studies program. "The actual event isn't imbued with all of the power issues, all of the social construction that having female dancers would--it doesn't carry all that baggage with it."