Kenny Rosales
Chris Barcelos, right, leading Queer Yoga: “Any space where you’re wearing spandex and doing weird things and sweating — it’s vulnerable.”
The inside of the James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Church on East Johnson Street has been cleared out. Chairs have been stacked against the wall and a mini rainbow of yoga mats and black foam blocks dot the marbled-laminate floor.
Attendance on this balmy Sunday afternoon is thinner than usual for Madison’s only Queer Yoga class. Teacher Chris Barcelos starts a playlist from the soundtrack of Pose, a Netflix drama about New York City’s queer ballroom culture of the ’80s and early ’90s.
Barcelos welcomes the students to the vinyasa class, advertised as consent-oriented, body positive and celebrating all bodies, sizes and abilities. Down the hall is a single-stall, gender neutral restroom.
Students clamber onto all fours to warm up in cat-cow pose. Barcelos invites them to gently transition from a lowered head and curved spine to arched back and head up stance. “Not like those ridiculous things they have at bars in Texas…” Barcelos trails off. “A bronco?” a student suggests. Everyone laughs.
“Did anyone watch the last episode of Pose?” Barcelos asks as Stephanie Mills’ bouncy, pop-funk ballad “Never Knew Love Like this Before” comes up on the playlist. “Like three times,” a yogi responds emphatically. The song was performed in a dream sequence by a trans woman who was murdered by a john. “If you need to cry during this song, go ahead,” says Barcelos, recounting an entire class during which, as a student, they wept on their mat. “All the feelings are welcome.”
Barcelos, who relocated to Madison from Massachusetts in January, is a UW-Madison professor of gender and women’s studies. Barcelos — who uses they/their pronouns — researches public health through queer, race and feminist perspectives. A yoga teacher since 2012, Barcelos leads the class with an intentional, yet light, demeanor, inviting yogis to take movements rather than telling them to.
As students lift their arms to the sky with their legs in a standing lunge for crescent pose, Barcelos quips, “No limp wrists in queer yoga!” Following the challenging twisting and balancing of eagle pose, the students shake their bodies. “Only in queer yoga when you say ‘shake it out’ do people actually do it,” Barcelos says with a smile.
After class, regular attendee Sam Million-Weaver says he can shed normative ideas in the Queer Yoga space.
“As queers, we have that ‘should’ narrative in so many other places in our life — ‘I should present this way,’ ‘I should act more masculine.’” Million-Weaver also appreciates a queer space that isn’t a night club.
“[They’re] very fun, but there is something to be said for a queer space that you can go to and not wake up with a hangover the next day and go to bed early,” he says.
Following the practice, Barcelos explains that traditional yoga studios can be exclusive places, rampant with body politics. Teachers may use gendered language and make assumptions about students’ bodies.
“Any space where you’re wearing spandex and doing weird things and sweating — it’s vulnerable,” Barcelos says. “Even if someone does feel welcome in a mostly-straight yoga class, that’s not the same as feeling at home in a space that’s meant specifically for you.”
Those vulnerable spaces can be extra intense for queer folks in practices like yoga, dance or martial arts when they get up close and personal with bodies they’ve been told are unacceptable or abnormal.
“[The class] is a safer place in which to practice dealing with your body the way it is,” Barcelos says. “Through having this safer space to be with your body, you can facilitate insights into it.”
14.3: Percentage of American adults who practiced yoga in 2017
The Rig-Veda: Ancient Indian text dating to 1500 B.C. that includes first documented use of the word “yoga.”
Info on Queer Yoga: facebook.com/Madison-Queer-Yoga-2122216861173007/
7: months the class has been going.
Barcelos’ advice to queer folks who are interested in yoga, but may be intimidated: “There’s a reason we call it ‘practicing yoga’ — it’s never ‘perfect’ and it’s not meant to be. Your mat is a space to practice messing up and being messy.”
