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One of the world’s first openly transgender professional choreographers and dancers creates powerful dances that combine full-throttle movement and storytelling to bring transgender and queer stories to the stage. Sean Dorsey has won four Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (Izzies)—the San Francisco Modern Dance equivalent of the Academy Awards.

Sean Dorsey gives voice to longtime survivors of the early AIDS epidemic in his award-winning work THE MISSING GENERATION—which he created after traveling the US for two years to record oral histories with LGBT longtime survivors. Dorsey reminds audiences of the homophobia, transphobia, secrecy, police brutality, and discrimination trans and queer people experienced decades ago—but also how they found love and community—in The Secret History of Love, the result of his oral history interviews with LGBT elders.

But Dorsey came to dance late. He took hobby courses, a summer jazz workshop, jazz and modern dance classes at the University of British Columbia, while studying political science and Women’s Studies. “Before that point, I’d never seen anybody like me in dance. When I was in high school, there was no Gay-Straight Alliance. There was nobody who was out in my high school as queer or trans, so it was unthinkable that somebody like me would be in dance, let alone in choreography. It wasn’t until these hobby classes I took during grad school when ballet and modern dance professional teachers suggested to me that I could be a professional dancer that the possibility even entered my mind,” said Dorsey.

Sean is from Vancouver, Canada, and his mother is a feminist and lesbian. His mom was a very out feminist. So, Sean grew up with a fire for social justice; in high school, he was given an award for social responsibility because of his activism as a teen. When Sean came out, all his family was very loving and supportive. While he was afraid to tell one grandmother and a great aunt in their early 90s, both separately said something like, “Oh, honey, I always knew you were trans. I was just waiting for you to feel comfortable enough to let me know. I love you very much.”

After immersing himself in professional dance training at age twenty-five for two years, dancing for eight hours a day at a dance school called Main Dance in Vancouver, Sean came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001, founded Fresh Meat Productions and the Fresh Meat Festival in 2002, and Sean Dorsey Dance in 2005. He also danced with Lizz Roman and Dancers, a daring site-specific dance company, for six years.

“Every transgender person has a unique journey. Most of us have stories that don’t fit the mainstream ‘I was born in the wrong body’ narrative. Generally, it’s not our own feelings about our trans bodies and identities that cause us the most pain—it’s the discomfort and discrimination we endure from the rest of the world! I was out for seven or eight years as transgender before I had chest surgery, and for ten years before I chose to take hormones. I danced professionally with Lizz Roman and other companies and was out as trans. Because I chose not to take testosterone, for ten years I didn’t have the low voice I have now, so I wasn’t always read by the world as male and was often mis-gendered—which is painful.”

“The hardest part of being a trans dancer is not having peers or mentors. Simple things like walking into a new dance studio, going into gendered bathrooms, using a gendered changing room and changing clothes before class are very difficult. Modern dance is a profoundly gendered field and very few people have done the work necessary to make their studios, companies or theaters welcoming or safe for trans people. This is part of the work I do now on tour, teaching classes and workshops across the country—creating safe dancing spaces for trans and gender non-conforming people,” said Sean.

Sean Dorsey is the Artistic Director and choreographer of Sean Dorsey Dance (he also performs in his work) and the Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions, one of the first year-round transgender multidisciplinary arts nonprofit organizations in the world. In 2012, Fresh Meat Productions became the first transgender organization to be awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Sean Dorsey is young, but is well aware of the groundbreaking and heartbreaking work that his LGBTQ elders and ancestors have done before him: “This is what drives me as an artist and an activist: our trans and queer stories aren’t recorded in mainstream history—and are often left out of the family album. My work as a trans artist is to bring our stories to light—in a way that is accessible and resonant for trans, queer and straight audiences alike. This is why I recorded oral histories with trans and queer elders to create my last two productions, THE MISSING GENERATION (currently on a 20-city tour of the U.S.) and The Secret History of Love (which recently completed a 20-city tour).”

Sean Dorsey and Shawna Virago.

Photo by Lydia Daniller

At performances of THE MISSING GENERATION, sold-out audiences of young and old, straight and queer, dancer and non-dancer, sit next to one another in the theater, tears rolling down their faces. For those caregivers, survivors who escaped AIDS, and longtime survivors living with HIV/AIDS, THE MISSING GENERATION is a powerful reminder of the losses of the ‘80s and ‘90s of so many gay, bi, and trans people to AIDS, as well as a testament to the beauty and power of the communities who held those losses and fought for justice.

The Secret History of Love reveals the underground ways that trans and queer people managed to find love and community in decades past when it was illegal to gather in public or wear clothing of the “opposite” gender. The show’s sound score includes excerpts from the oral history interviews, including bold declarations of love in the face of great danger for those open queers and trans people in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Before STONEWALL, LGBTQ people could be fired, exposed, beat up or even murdered without any rights, protections or recourse. Lesbians, gays, and trans people could lose their children and their families of origin. Financial and emotional ruin was and still is, especially for trans people, a very real possibility in America.

Dorsey feels strongly that the queer community needs to remember and know the stories of the past. His work attracts intergenerational audiences and opens up the conversation between trans and queer, queer and straight, old and young. That dialogue moves hearts and minds. Every Sean Dorsey Dance performance spills over into the lobby for wine, non-alcoholic beverages and conversations to continue. “I’m always mindful of how my elders and ancestors’ art and activism and struggles made my life possible” Dorsey said.

Fresh Meat Festival, produced by Fresh Meat Productions, is not a low-quality community performing arts program. It’s a professionally staged and well-curated set of performances by diverse artists. Professional ballroom dance champions; original music; spoken word; performance art; comedy; Taiko drumming; all this and more is found at the festival. The eclectic festival, produced annually during Pride month, is ever-changing, with eternally strong production values. Fifteen years after founding Fresh Meat Productions, Dorsey continues to curate and produce the sold-out performances.

In an increasingly gentrified San Francisco, Sean and his partner of fifteen years, fellow transgender activist, musician, and singer-songwriter Shawna Virago, live in the same rent-controlled house Shawna’s lived in for twenty years. “We have a truly lovely, wonderful, kind landlord who’s very generous. He loves us and we love him. That’s a big reason we can be here making work in San Francisco. My work with my dance company, Sean Dorsey Dance, and Fresh Meat Productions allow me to sustain myself as an artist. We are always busy because we operate year-round programs—making new work, the Festival in June, the Sean Dorsey Dance home season in April, the Sean Dorsey Dance year-round national touring, and LGBT-friendly dance and self-expression workshops across the US.”

Sean considers himself foremost a choreographer and dancer—but always an activist. It is that passion that led him to leap onto the stage as an openly transgender modern dancer and choreographer: to make dances, but also to work for justice.

Transgender people still face legally-codified and socially-sanctioned discrimination in the nation and the state’s criminal justice, employment, education, and healthcare systems. Trans people experience a disproportionate percentage of hate crimes and police brutality—90 percent have experienced harassment on the job; 61 percent have experienced physical assault; 64 percent have experienced sexual assault; transgender households are four times more likely to have an annual household income below $10,000 compared to the cisgender population; and 47 percent have been fired for being transgender (National Center for Transgender Equality, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, GLAAD, 2013-15). Added to this, transgender people rarely see affirmative representations of themselves in dance, the performing arts, or the media.

Dorsey’s advice to any transgender person who wants to become a professional dancer is: “GO FOR IT! I want to see transgender dancers feel empowered and beautiful in their bodies and feel that dancing is our birthright. Make sure you’re connected to support during training rehearsals and time spent in the field. As trans people, using our bodies as our primary instrument in a highly-gendered field, hard stuff can come up—either feelings you have about your body or feelings or judgments other people have about your body. There is so much gender-based casting, gendered roles and gendered partnering in dance—this is painful.” Sean encourages everyone to “adopt some kind of self-kindness practice. One thing anyone can do is put a hand over your heart and give yourself positive messages. You can look in the mirror and tell yourself that your body is beautiful. All people, especially trans people and queer people, people from communities of color and people with disabilities have wounded hearts and feelings because we have been given so many negative and hateful messages from other people about our bodies—we can really benefit from a self-kindness practice.”

Brain science now proves that affirmations, whether or not consciously believed, can actually rewire hardwired neural pathways, laying down new tracks in the brain, carving grooves, expanding dendrites and firing synapses, changing brain chemistry and brain circuitry (“Brain Scans Can Help Explain Why Self-Affirmation Works,” Christian Jarrett, New York Magazine, 11/16/15). For trans people who suffer disproportionately from bias, these emerging findings offer hope.

For Sean Dorsey, who lives on more than hope, life is good. At forty-four, in a long-term happy relationship for fifteen years with a transwoman artist, doing work he loves in a city that protects and supports trans people and loves the arts, he has defied the statistics. A professional choreographer and dancer for nearly twenty years, founding director of the nation’s first year-round transgender multidisciplinary arts nonprofit for fifteen years: Sean is ready for the next artistic mountain to climb.

“GO FOR IT! I want to see transgender dancers feel empowered and beautiful in their bodies and feel that dancing is our birthright. Make sure you’re connected to support during training rehearsals and time spent in the field.”

Sean Dorsey