The ‘reel’ deal: Meet the Peninsula’s longtime LGBTQ square dance club

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For nearly 40 years, El Camino Reelers square dance club has been the heart of Palo Alto’s LGBTQ square dancing community, offering locals the chance to hone their dance skills and forge lasting friendships in a safe, inclusive environment.

The long-running organization, a member of the International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs, was founded back in 1985, in part as a way to combat discrimination faced by LGBTQ dancers at the time. 

“The first LGBTQ square dance clubs in the area were in San Francisco, and those were originally formed because we weren’t welcome at the straight clubs,” said caller and teacher Kurt Gollhardt, who’s also the president of the Santa Clara Valley Callers Association. 

“Clubs had trouble getting straight callers to call for them, too. That was the relationship with gay folks at the time,” he said.

El Camino Reelers founders Marilyn Martinyak and Pat Dixon started the group because they longed to take part in LGBTQ square dance activities but didn’t want to have to make the trip up to San Francisco each week, club board of directors treasurer and graphics designer Ed Wilson said. 

“A lot of the early members were women, and then gradually over time, it shifted to being mostly men,” he said. Now, “it’s a mix of everything,” including plenty of straight people, who have appreciated the sense of belonging and casual atmosphere.

El Camino Reelers – with its logo of an El Camino mission bell against a rainbow squares background – has always prided itself on being open and welcoming to all, free from some of the strict rules that have sometimes been in place elsewhere.

“Our policy has always been, you don’t need to have a partner. Even if we are coupled, we dance with other people every dance,” caller Michael Levy said. “In the straight community, in particular years ago, you came as a couple, you danced as a couple, you didn’t get to dance with other people. When somebody’s spouse died they were almost thrown out.”

“Some clubs literally did that!” Gollhardt added. “Married couples only, and once you were not married, you were asked to leave the club. That’s very sad and amazing from our point of view.” 

In square dancing choreography, board secretary Oliver Vogel said, “We have roles. You can dance as a boy or a girl. In our club, it doesn’t matter what you present as. You can dance as a girl – and it’s actually my preferred way – but I can dance as either one, and that also has lots of appeal.” 

Especially in the early days, members said, other clubs often insisted on a formal dress code – ladies in petticoats and crinolines for example – which can be cost-prohibitive in addition to uncomfortable for some. El Camino Reelers have always been welcome to dance in whatever feels right for them (although the club does sometimes host fun theme nights). 

Attendees who associate the scene with barns and hoedowns may be surprised to learn that the Reelers like to dance to pop tunes, “which also has more appeal to hopefully younger people, and general people as well. I’m not a country western person, so I’m glad I don’t have to endure it while square dancing,” Vogel laughed. 

While many mainstream clubs, especially in progressive areas, have evolved with the times and have become more casual and flexible, gay clubs like the El Camino Reelers, Gollhardt said, have always been ahead of the curve. 

“Just the general attitude is much more open and friendly and welcoming, we think. It’s those kinds of aspects that draw people to us even if they’re not LGBT,” Levy said. 

Square dancing – if your only experience has been your middle school P.E. days and it’s been a while – is a type of traditional social group dance that involves four couples arranged in a square configuration. In most cases, the dancers are cued by a live caller, who calls out the steps along with the music. El Camino Reelers practice what’s known as modern western square dancing, which draws upon a shared knowledge of calls and definitions (they follow the programs of Callerlab, the International Association of Square Dance Callers, which are organized into levels). It’s up to each caller to decide on the choreography, with the dancers following along in real time. 

Modern square dance is “unlike a line dance or a traditional square dance format, where you learn over and over what are the steps for a particular song,” Gollhardt said. “We don’t have preset steps for a song. Instead we learn a bunch of movements by their names, and we get to react on the fly.” That, dancers said, is part of the fun. 

A good caller, Levy said, offers choreography with a good flow, and is a charismatic entertainer, building rapport with the dancers and keeping them engaged.

“They bring that nice balance of, it’s successful for the dancers, they feel like they’re capable but they’re stretched a bit and challenged,” he said.

“And you’ve got to be a good singer! That’s a lot of it too,” Wilson added, noting that Levy calls at events all over the nation. As popular callers like Levy build up a reputation and a following, they become in demand on the circuit. 

“Clubs will bring in guest callers from all over the country,” Levy said. “People will fly in across the country from other clubs.”

Each Reeler has their own story of how they fell under square dancing’s spell. 

Gollhardt was living on the East Coast when he started in the early ’90s. 

“At the time, the opportunities for activities that were focused on gay people were small,” he recalled. A free trial class in New York City was his introduction. “I completely fell in love with it right off the bat. It was an activity where there was no smoking, no drinking, a relaxed environment,” he said. “Over the years, I’ve realized it’s sort of fundamental because we’re dancing cooperatively in a group of eight, so it keeps a group of people who are cooperative people rather than aggressive people. It’s a comfortable environment.”

Vogel, who’s originally from Germany, was first inspired to square dance after seeing his mother enjoy it. Levy, who’s been dancing for 27 years, was invited to try it by someone he met in a leather bar. 

“I just could not stop smiling the whole night. The choreography, the flowingness of the dance just brought me a lot of joy. I was hooked really quickly,” he said. 

El Camino Reelers board president Michael Golden was living in Kansas City with a housemate who tried for over a year to convince him to give square dancing a shot. 

“I thought it was the hokiest thing you could possibly do,” he laughed. But he eventually was persuaded to attend a gay square dance convention and soon enough he was a convert, joining his local club. 

“They drew me into square dancing just by their own personalities and joining a friendly group of people,” he said. 

Wilson’s first exposure was at a pride parade in the late ’90s. A friend who was a square dancer needed someone to haul a caller in a pickup truck, which Wilson happened to have. It became a more integral part of his life after his partner passed away following a long illness in 2000. Wilson recalled talking to a friend over the phone, telling him “how I didn’t know anybody … sort of at a loss,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing with my life and he said, ‘Well, why aren’t you square dancing?’ And so I am. I’ve been ever since.” 

The Reelers meet to dance most Tuesday evenings at St. Andrew’s United Methodist Church in Palo Alto (depending on who turns up, the difficulty levels of the dances may vary). Annual membership is $50 and attendance at club nights is $10. Multi-week classes in varying levels, with new sessions usually begun annually, are led by callers, with the help of experienced dancers. The club also holds special events from time to time, which draw people from the wider square dance community, and periodic open houses, when people with any experience level can check out what the Reelers are all about. 

Attendance at square dancing clubs in general has declined over the past few decades, club members said, and as longtime members reach retirement age and move out of Silicon Valley to more affordable areas, it’s been difficult to keep membership levels up. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t help matters, although the group kept active and connected by meeting up and dancing over Zoom. The group tries to reach out to potential dancers via social media in addition to good old-fashioned flyers and word of mouth. One of the challenges in recruiting newbies, members said, is that to be proficient, dancers need to commit to learning the moves and terminology. 

Unlike some social dance activities, Gollhardt said, modern square dancing doesn’t really work well as an occasional event for folks who aren’t already familiar with the basics. “It’s a cumulative knowledge where you have to learn this set of calls that belong to this particular program,” he said.

Square dancing, Wilson said, “takes a lot of repetition and a lot of memorizing. If you do it enough to really get to a competent level it’s going to take you a while; it’s going to take you the better part of the year.”

Those who get hooked and are able to put in the time to learn, though, become “a group of people who are really invested in the club, invested in each other. There’s almost an assumption that once you start square dancing, you will continue your square dance until you drop,” he said. “Many people do. Many people do it for the rest of their life.”

The El Camino Reelers will hold a free open house April 5, 7:30 p.m. at St. Andrews United Methodist Church, 4111 Alma St., Palo Alto. For more information, go to reelers.org.