Where Are All the Queer Women in Ballet?

Hélène Paquet

Why are lesbian and bisexual women largely absent from the ballet world? While many male dancers have come out as gay, queer female dancers are still vastly underrepresented, though they do exist. Going against the grain of enduring stereotypes, some choreographers are working toward normalizing their presence within companies, as well as female partnerships on stage.

From Nijinsky to Nureyev, ballet has historically featured many openly gay men. With the exception of those based in Russia and countries with anti-LGBTQIA+ laws, today, many male dancers post photos of their partners and proudly display rainbow flags on social media. In contrast, their lesbian and bisexual counterparts remain more discreet, to the point of being almost invisible.

“When I was in professional ballet companies, [being a queer woman] really felt like a novelty,” says former New York City Ballet and Miami City Ballet dancer Adriana Pierce. “It felt very isolating.” The thirty-something ballerina now focuses on her own choreography and running Queer the Ballet, an organization she founded after the pandemic to promote LGBTQIA+ representation in the ballet world.

In many social and professional settings, the history of queer women is a history of erasure. As historian Florence Tamagne says, “lesbian history is a coded one made up of silences, unsaid things and traces that have to be decrypted and interpreted.” The dance world is no exception. While historian Hélène Marquié insists that many different factors are at play, she stresses the persistence of the prejudices weighing on ballerinas. They have to conform to an “ideal of graceful, fragile femininity,” she says, but also “what a good lesbian should look like—what the right hairstyle is and how she should behave.” For girls who start ballet very young, “not being straight is not really an option,” Marquié adds. Conversely, the stereotype of the gay male dancer forces boys to question their sexuality from an early age.
 

“They definitely experience their own forms of discrimination,” says Pierce, who doesn’t view her gay and bisexual colleagues as competition. “But it was strange to be in a very gay space, while also realizing that gayness didn’t include me and my experiences.”
 

Over the course of her career, Pierce resented having her identity negated. “It didn’t feel like there was space for me to be who I really was,” she says. “I definitely felt a lot of pressure to act and look like the other straight women in the company, whether that was to do with what I was wearing, or the lipstick I used... There were a few times when I worried that, somehow, my dancing would signal that I’m gay. Whenever I brought this up, I was told I was being too sensitive.” The pressure to conform is multiplied by the demands of being in the corps, where female dancers are required to look almost identical. Yet Pierce concedes that things are slowly changing, noting that younger generations are less shy about their queerness than she was.

Male dancers have not always been suspected of being gay. “This only started to appear at the end of the 19^th century,” Marquié says. “Before that, I’ve never seen that type of rumor about any male dancer in the archive. There were such rumors about ballerinas, however!” Even if it cannot be verified, this type of gossip attests to the way people thought about dance and dancers in the past. 

“It was said that 18^th-century French ballet star Marie Sallé, who was not known for having lovers, only socialized with women. Writers and art critics the Goncourt brothers compared her habits to those of Marie Camargo. Another great dancer of the time, she famously had many lovers.”

Modern dance pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller were more open about their sexual preferences than their predecessors. Was this connected to their rejection of ballet’s conventions? “Mostly it was because they did not have the same working conditions,” says Marquié. “They were American expats in France, which gave them greater freedom. More importantly, they were independent, which was radically different from being on a ballet company’s payroll. Loie Fuller did depend on theatre managers, but she controlled her own international career. She also had powerful allies like the Queen of Romania.

The erasure of lesbians continues on ballet stages today. While works depicting male homosexuality have become increasingly common—from the homoerotic subtext of Nureyev’s Swan Lake (1964) to the ballet-and-drag performances of the New York-based Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—ballets centred on lesbian lives and desire remain rare. One notable exception is Northern Ballet’s Gentleman Jack. Premiered in March 2026, the ballet explores the life of Anne Lister, the early-19^th-century diarist, landowner and businesswoman whose writings documented her relationships with women.

Yet questioning gender norms in ballet can fuel creativity. Pierce, for example, has changed the way audiences see partnering by choreographing pas de deux for women. “There’s a lot of work to be done in terms of understanding ballet partnering as broader than what we’ve been taught,” she says. “When I’m choreographing partner work with two women, for example, they’re not used to trusting each other with their weight. It doesn’t mean that the strength isn’t there, it means they’re scared to trust and put their weight there.”

Pierce adds that treating classical ballet pointework as a tool, rather than a gendered technique, opens up far more interesting creative possibilities. “When you’re standing on pointe and you’re trying to partner another person, you don’t feel as grounded as when you’re in a flat shoe,” she says. “I realized that if that’s the case, then in every classical partnership you see with a man standing in a flat shoe partnering a woman in a pointe shoe, the man inherently has more agency because of his footwear. I try to find ways for each dancer to have agency within the partnership, no matter who’s wearing what.”

Marquié points out another blind spot in ballet tradition. “We’ve had every possible version of Swan Lake under the sun, but there has never been a feminist or a lesbian version,” she laments. “I’d love to see Odette and Odile end up together, with the queen mother’s blessing, and for them to send the prince back to his hunting activities!”

Hélène Paquet is a freelance journalist. She works mainly on gender and equality issues, online cultures and dance, which is a passion of hers and which she has been practicing since childhood. She is also a doctoral student in sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where she has been studying media coverage of LGBT+ issues since the late 1990s.

Queer the Ballet 
learn more

Gentleman Jack
Choreography: Northern Ballet
from April 1 to 3, Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Loïe Fuller, A Subversive Pioneer
by Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau for CN D Magazine
to read