One of the most successful and loved callers on the gay and lesbian square dnace circuit. What she has to say may surprise you.

Interview by Joseph Bean

"Like everybody else, I hated it."

That's how Anne Uebelacker felt about square dancing when she first encountered it. She was raised in a British household in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, and music of all sorts was part of the program at home. Her English father even had a band which Anne played in, and ballroom dancing was "a big thing" for the family. Still, Anne says, "I guess it wasn't until I was in my teens I found out there was such a thing as square dancing. It was part of the phys-ed requirement at school, and you're supposed to dislike it. That's what all the kids say." Like the rest of the kids, Anne soon stopped hating square dancing. In fact, she forgot all about it. Then, some years later, it was through her parents that she was reintroduced to square dancing.

How did that happen?

When I moved to Toronto-! guess I was probably in my late 20s-I would try to go home and be with my parents on weekends, but they were never there. They were always out square dancing.

Had they been square dancing all along, or was that something they took up after you moved away from home?

They actually wanted to do something different after I had moved away. I guess they were looking for a different type of dance, and somebody told them about square dancing. So, they went and tried it and they loved it. I would go home on weekends and it'd be, "Well, find something to do because we're going to go out to this dance and this dance and this dance and .... " So I finally went to a square dance weekend with them, a campout. And of course, it was the typical story, familiar to any square dancer: It was one person short of a square.

(Anne laughs, now, as she recalls her own surprising progress from reluctantly. learning basic steps to dancing plus-level before the weekend was over. "The dancing was great," she remembers, "I found it easy." Back home in Toronto, Anne found and joined a square dance club. A short time later, she says, she "did a foolish thing." That is, she got married. In fact, she was married twice before she "figured out" that it was a mistake for her. Some very good things also came out of Anne's years in Toronto: Her career and her son, Todd, who is now 9.)

I met this fellow who knew how to write choreography, who had figured out how the caller got the dancers back to their corners and all the rest of it. It wasn't magic. It was actually hard work. His name's Dave Johnson, and he started me off. He just taught me how to write choreography more than anything else. He was not a caller, just a person that liked to figure out how to do this stuff. So that was the sort of breakthrough. I went up to the local club caller and asked if he would show me how to call, teach me how to do this? And the response was, "Nope. Don't need any competition in my club."

Was it Dave johnson's interest in figuring out the geometry on the floor that sparked your interest in calling?

No. Basically it just amazed me how the caller always knew where everybody was and how he could move these people around on the floor and then get them back. And Dave came along at the right time, just as I was questioning our local caller about learning how to do this. W hen I got turned down, Dave said, "You know, I know how to do this stuff. I don't know how to teach you to call, but I think you can probably figure that out." And it just started right then.

Did calling sort of take over from dancing then, or do you continue even now to dance when you can, and to call when you can?

Well, I call full time now, but I also love to dance almost as much as I love to call. So I try and squeeze both in. But at this point, I make my living calling, so that's sort of a necessity. I guess it's all what you make of it. I call four nights a week in Vancouver here for the club, Squares Across the Border. Then I'm gone just about every weekend, mostly in the States. I've done calling three times in Japan too, and I've been to Germany, Sweden, Denmark ....

This is a whole new subject, isn't it? Isn't square dancing a North American phenomenon?

Originally, yes. But over the past maybe eight years, it's spread all over Europe, and over into Asia. One odd thing about it is that English is the universal language for square dancing. So even if I go to Japan, I still call in English.

So, dancers in japan and other countries learn the calls probably not as words, but as a series of sounds that they react to in a certain way?

That's right. Of course, North American square dancers may not often notice it, but we are not much different from the Japanese dancers in the sense of learning to respond instantly with a motion or series of motions when certain words or sounds are heard.

(Really, dancers know what to do when they hear "pass the ocean" or "yellow rock," even though oceans and rocks have nothing to do with dancing . And they don't usually get too tangled or lost when a caller spews out a combination of "slip, slide, swing, and slither," although the connections between the specific actions and the actual words wouldn't be obvious to an untrained observer. So, English may be the universal language of square dancers and callers, but it might be just as accurate to say that square dance calls are a language in and of themselves.)

I spoke with one Japanese caller-at least I tried to-and he could speak maybe two or three words of English other than the square dance terms. Now he knew all of the square dance terms. He had listened to tapes of some of the American callers, and his English was a little strange, but the funniest part was he had a Southern accent. Of course he had a bit of a Japanese accent, and he also had a Southern twang.

I have a feeling it would be a pretty remarkable sight, a roomful of Japanese people square dancing. Do they wear the things we expect square dancers to wear, here? The ginghams and the plaids and all of that?

Well, actually they go one step further than that. They go all out, and they have some of the most beautiful outfits. Of course the women are all about 5 foot nothing and have 22-inch waists, and the men are a little bit more drab. They tend to do the dark colors still, like the regular navy blue or dark black suits. But there is no gay square dancing that's known in Japan.

No, that's understandable.

Yeah, it's taboo in Japan itself. But over in Europe, there are quite a few gay square dancers. Great. Do you do a lot of calling by now for gay square dancers? I do. My calling work is probably about 50 percent gay, 50 percent straight. This is a kind of funny thought. Were you doing any calling for gay square dancers before you came out?

Yes, I was. Yeah, the dancers in the gay clubs knew [I was gay] before I did. It just took me a little longer to figure it out, I guess. I probably have called for the gay clubs for about seven years, maybe eight. I should have known. It's not as though there weren't a lot of clues along the way when I look back.

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. Once you knew you were gay, did you go out of your way to hide it from anyone? I assume even now you must try not to make an issue of it with the straight clubs that you depend on for part of your living.

I found myself a girlfriend real quick. That was the reason that I came out. Then, I think, for about a year, probably, after I first got this all figured out, I kept things really low-key and quiet. And then I finally thought about it and I thought, "Wait a minute, I'm going to spend the rest of my life with this woman, what the heck is the matter with me?" And from then on I have been out, probably for almost five years, now.

Good. And you're still with that same first girlfriend?

Yeah. As I said to Gail, my girlfriend, when we were first getting together, I'd seen the same people around square dancing for probably eight to 10 years, but I just finally found the one I wanted ... for life.

So your girlfriend was a square dancer? Did coming out, or appearing with her on your arm, change your bookings?

Yes. In some of the Southern states, the straight clubs had a problem with it. I was canceled three or four weekends. One fellow from Tennessee phoned me up and said, "Look, we've got a lot of rednecks down here and I think for your safety and for ours, this is something that we should just cancel." So, with him, I was OK with it. At least he was honest. Some of the others just phoned up and left very short messages on the machine saying something like, "You can just take that date out of your book." One club didn't tell me until I had already bought my ticket. I phoned to tell them what time I'd be arriving, and they said, "Oh, didn't we tell you that we replaced you?" No, they didn't. But that was a few years ago, and now I've replaced a lot of those bookings with other people, and it doesn't seem to be as big an issue anymore.

Did coming out increase your bookings with gay clubs?

No, they're just about the same. I had already done a lot of calling with the gay clubs, and I thoroughly enjoyed