Certainly, wet dreams and masturbation might have more explicit similarity with intercourse, but they are also more explicitly selfish. Dancing involves partners, without body exposure, clean up, STD’s or emotional wreckage.

I like my sex public: at a stranger’s wedding reception. Wearing my lustful-but-formal tight black wool pants and tight white shirt with a tie so alive it could tie itself.

Brick House, Dancing Queen, Let’s Go Crazy, Billie Jean – the songs may be regular – like a prune-eating-fiber-supplement-taking geezer – but they are not shitty. Or maybe pop music is proof that you can polish a turd. I’ll keep eating it regardless. We are sweating and strutting our way to salvation. The crowd reactions are different – giggles, stares, smiles – but they are all the same: they wish they could be this wild.

Yet we are not enough for ourselves – no twist or thrust is fully satisfying. We cannot truly dance until we are without genitals, without gravity, without minds.

It’s only a few songs later when our humanity starts with its harrassment – unfortunately not sexual, just slumberous. Muscles slacken, hearts tap instead of pound. We are more attracted to a chair than the dance floor. Instead of sitting, we wave to people we don’t know, and sexily snicker and swagger to the elevator. We are out of there, and into the night – an early summer night – that sighs and presses its cool cocktail glass on our foreheads.