The moment I found out about The Turning Pointe by Vanessa L. Torres I knew I had to read it. It takes place in Minneapolis, on the very streets that I grew up on, and includes the very same people that I grew up around. To say this book feels like being transported back to my childhood is an understatement. I’ve read many books that have settings in places that I’ve been to, but there is nothing quite like this book. Nothing that talks about the city of my heart in such a way.
Minneapolis is one of the gayest cities in the country but it often gets overshadowed in favor of cities like San Francisco or New York in popular culture. But in the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the same thing was happening across the entire country. The queer community was being both negligently left to die and actively killed, just as it is today. Three years after Stonewall, the Twin Cities held their first Pride. Three years later, in 1975, Minneapolis became the first city in the US to pass a nondiscrimination ordinance. Since then, the Twin Cities have built up a strong reputation for being queer friendly, but acceptance doesn’t come just from legislation. Legislation can help keep us safe, but acceptance is built from many years of organizing and pushing since then.
This is the context in which Rosa and Nikki are growing up and exploring queerness through the lens of dance. Rosa is the daughter of a tyrant ballet Master and classically trained in ballet. And while she loves to dance, she questions whether ballet is what she’s meant to be doing. When Nikki comes into her life, he introduces her to jazz and queerness by extension, where the dance is free and expressive. And where the makings of culture are bursting at the seams.
The Revolution Starts in Minneapolis
For the people who read the book but are unfamiliar with Minneapolis, this ‘bursting at the seams’ feeling may seem like it’s only about dance and queerness. But as someone who grew up in Minneapolis, the city itself has always felt like it’s bursting at the seams too. It’s always been trying to break out of the strictness and structure of ballet and trying to find the culturemaking of jazz.
In Minnesota, there’s an unspoken support of each other that is hard to explain to people who haven’t felt it. It’s not something that you’ll always see easily, because you’ll probably just attribute it to Minnesota Nice or regular customer service. Or you may notice that we can still be quite passive aggressive, as anyone in any city can be. But it’s deeper than that. In Minnesota, people look out for their own.
I think it’s in no small part due to the intensity of winters, but Minnesotans are loyal and fiercely caring. We plow each other’s driveways, we deliver each other’s groceries, we watch each other’s pets, we share our toolboxes with our neighbors. These may seem like small things, but it’s second nature here. Every act of generosity and sharing rejects the culture of rugged individualism that the powers that be push so hard. Especially in the dead of winter, Minnesotans reject the culture that says “every man for himself” and pushes for a culture of love, expression, and “we gotta get through this together.” Just like jazz, and just like queerness. In weather that can be -40 degrees wind chill, community becomes essential to survive, just like with queerness.
For those of you reading this, you’ve probably learned about this loyalty recently when watching ICE terrorize our little mid sized metro area. Where Minnesotans gathered a crowd of thousands of people in -20 degree weather against ICE presence in our city. Or a few years before that, in response to the police murder of George Floyd, where citizens burnt down the third precinct, Target, and Wendy’s and left POC owned small businesses untouched (well, mostly. Fire spreads).
So as I sit outside of the Gay 90s, the largest gay bar in the Midwest and where the police raid takes place in The Turning Pointe, I’m reminded that our history is much more recent than school or textbooks make it seem. The main characters are younger than my mom. The Gay 90s has been around in its current state since at least the ’70s and it’s still fostering a safe space. We’ve been protesting for as long as I can remember and even more so recently. All of these time periods overlap. Maybe Prince was right that the revolution would start in Minnesota. We are also bursting at the seams.
Everyday Love, Protests, & Queerness
The 90s is on Hennepin, one of the most central streets in downtown. The white tent where the entrance line forms is worn down, the paper signs that say “18+” look like they’ve been taped there for weeks. It isn’t run down from disuse, though, it’s the opposite. You can see the wear and tear because it’s full of life. People wait in this line every day, through every season. You can see the history through the tiles on the walls and the ground at exit doors. It’s a shame, but they really don’t make anything like that anymore. If another business would have bought the building and redone it likely without the tile, but instead this tile is frozen in time, spending its nights wishing for everyone to get home safely.
The book doesn’t quite get into this explicitly, but there is a culturemaking implication in placing this story so firmly in a specific time and in a real place. Though it wasn’t that long ago, placing the story like this makes it clear that we’ve built back stronger than the city in the book, where police would openly raid gay bars with no consequence. Minneapolis being one of the gayest cities in the country is in large part because of the continued fight to create queer spaces and maintain the ones that already exist in the time since this book takes place. Of course, police raids can still happen, but they are harder to get away with now without sparking a public relations nightmare. And that’s because of us.
What the book does get into is the contrast of ballet and funk. Ballet features highly formalized steps and movements. It is classical and poised as incredibly high on that fake hierarchy of dance prestige. The entire discipline is a highly technical art that emphasizes physical athleticism. Funk, on the other hand, is rhythm driven and built as you go. It’s born out of Black and Brown music and culture, and placed low on the fake hierarchy of dance prestige. It values expression and feeling over the technical precision of ballet.
We all have a lifetime of propaganda fed to us, culminating in a set of societal norms that we’re “supposed” to follow. Stay in your own lane, don’t ask for help, pull yourself up from your bootstraps. Cultural norms that tell us that poverty is a moral failing and not a systemic issue. That we are meant to raise nuclear families instead of cohabitate as a village. Cultural norms that teach us to live our lives like the technical precision of ballet. But when you break free of the rigidity in favor of expression, and when you build community by reaching out a hand to one another, we start to change the world.
This year at the Minnesota State Fair, the Fine Art exhibition has historically always been that type of art that they try to convince you is apolitical. The kind they call “fine” art, placing it above politics in the hierarchy of prestige. But this year, all art that was submitted was of “lower tier” art with statements against ICE and police violence from earlier this year. This is instead of what is traditionally thought of as “fine art,” rejecting the rigidity of ballet and opting for the expression of jazz and funk. The wait to get in was 2 hours long. Just as we have for decades, Minnesotans are rebuilding how we want, stronger for the next time.
Bookish Brews Snapshot
The Turning Pointe by Vanessa L. Torres
Rosa is born to dance but she’s not sure that ballet is her calling. When her tyrant ballet Master, who is also her father, announces auditions for a concert with Prince, Rosa is determined to show the world she can groove even without the pointe shoes.
🎨 Contemporary Fiction 📖 Couldn’t Put It Down 😭 Emotional 💞 Young Love
- Genre: Historical Fiction, Young Adult
