Queers in ballet!? This shocking development is revealed by Mr. Stoneley in this very interesting book on the secret culture of ballet. As a homosexual choreographer, I was pleased and relieved to have the elephant in the room acknowledged. - Mark Morris

''Peter Stoneley sheds welcome light on an open secret: that ballet has long responded to and inspired gay male culture. Of use to scholars and students alike, this book will be an important addition to any library of queer studies, dance studies, and contemporary performance history and theory.'' - Thomas DeFrantz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

There has long been a popular perception of a connection between ballet and homosexuality, a connection that, for strategic reasons, has often been denied by those in the dance world. A Queer History of the Ballet focuses on how, as makers and as audiences, queer men and women have helped to develop many of the texts, images, and legends of ballet. Further, the book explores the ways in which, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ballet has been a means of conjuring homosexuality - of enabling some degree of expression and visibility for people who were otherwise declared illegal and obscene.

This book presents a series of historical case studies, including:

the perverse sororities of the Romantic ballet;

the fairy in folklore, literature, and ballet;

Tchaikovsky and the making of Swan Lake;

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and the emergence of queer modernity;

the formation of ballet in America;

the queer uses of the prima ballerina;

Genet's writings for and about ballet.

Stoneley ends with a consideration of how ballet's queer tradition has been memorialised by such contemporary dance-makers as Neumeier, Bausch, Bourne and Preljocaj.

This lively, accessible study will appeal to students, scholars and general readers with an interest in dance, and in queer history.