The Unofficial Record.
Boots slide across the floor. Heads turn in the same direction. Entire rows of strangers execute the same sequence of steps. It’s choreographed. Then you start noticing the people.
One of the things I've come to appreciate about the Coachella Valley is that it often feels cast by Central Casting. Everybody arrives with a backstory. Everybody arrives with a reinvention. Everybody arrives carrying some version of the life they thought they’d have and the life they ended up with. And what fascinates me about Cat City Agua Country Night isn’t the dancing. It’s the collision.
The east valley is here. The west valley is here. The line dancers are here. The gays are here. The straights are here. The retirees are here. The Mexicans are here. The newcomers are here. People who normally wouldn’t share a room voluntarily somehow agree to occupy the same dance floor. For a few hours every Thursday night, the republics suspend their borders. Agua becomes common ground, a ceasefire with a dance floor, West Side Story with boot stomps. And somehow it works.
Like every republic, this one has its folklore. The east valley has its loyalties. The west valley has its loyalties. Instructors have their followers. DJs have their followers. Entire social calendars are built around particular venues and particular nights. Somewhere in the background there was a divorce that became local mythology. Followers split. Alliances formed. Venues became territories. Entire pockets of the community quietly chose sides.
Viewed from a sufficient distance, it feels less like nightlife and more like anthropology.
The thing nobody tells you about line dancing is that very little of it is about dancing. On the surface everyone is trying to master a sequence of steps. Five, six, seven, eight. Turn. Shuffle. Heel. Toe. Repeat. Spend enough time around a dance floor, however, and you begin to realize people are working on something much larger.
The retiree isn’t trying to master the dance. She’s trying to master aging. The newly broken up man isn’t trying to master the dance. He’s trying to master beginning again. The newcomer standing against the wall isn’t trying to master the dance. She’s trying to master the voice in her head telling her she’ll look foolish. The instructor isn’t trying to master the dance. They’re trying to master the impossible task of helping twenty different people learn at twenty different speeds.
People come for different reasons. Some come to dance. Some come because they're lonely. Some come because their friends dragged them there. Some come because somebody attractive told them to. Before long friendships form. Crushes form. Little groups appear. People find mentors. People find rivals. Occasionally they find a version of themselves they admire and decide they'd like to become that person when they grow up.
Everybody is trying to master something. They just think it’s the dance.
The Plastics fascinated me because every country scene eventually invents them. They know every dance, every variation, every flourish, and every unofficial embellishment added somewhere between the dance floor and the parking lot. While the rest of the room is trying to learn the dance, they're trying to improve it—or at least make sure everyone notices.
I've watched perfectly confident beginners abandon a dance halfway through because three Plastics in the front row decided the choreography needed their personal touch.
Nobody likes this.
That's why they're called The Plastics.
The clique comes with its own politics. People get adopted into the group, disappear from the rest of the room, then eventually get exiled and return like survivors of a small coup. Mind you, these are people well into their forties.
Bless their hearts.
What eventually changed my opinion of them was seeing them somewhere else. A different venue. A different crowd. Suddenly the local celebrity at Agua became another dancer at Stampede. The audience disappeared.
The Amazon boots remained. The Boot Barn bandana merch they probably got from me remained. The cheap rhinestones remained.
And underneath all of it was the same insecurity everybody else was carrying.
One evening a gentleman who had more or less exiled my friend and me from a former country republic walked into the room. We watched him cross the dance floor and exchanged the same look: the audacity. The absolute gall of this man to walk into our watering hole.
Then his crush walked in behind him.
My friend immediately jolted upright, turned toward me completely serious, and asked, "How's my hair?"
One second we were secure in our little corner of the republic. The next we were exactly like everyone else.
Most people aren’t trying to become great dancers. They’re trying to become brave enough to be seen.
The funny thing is that none of it was intentional. I didn’t set out to become a line dancer. I didn’t set out to become involved with the rodeo. I didn’t set out to launch a country night. I certainly didn’t expect to spend a year and a half opening a Boot Barn and accidentally becoming fluent in western culture.
One thing led to another. A dance lesson became a country night. A country night became a troupe. A troupe became fundraisers. Fundraisers became a rodeo. A retail job became an education. Before long I found myself immersed in a culture I had spent most of my life avoiding, not because I was trying to become an expert, but because I kept showing up.
The path back began with a line dance lesson in an unlikely place. Every week the instructor taught the same eight counts. The same four lesbians. The same UPS driver. The same routine. The lesson took place inside a dive bar that spent the rest of its afternoon showing X-rated films at four o’clock. This created an atmosphere that can best be described as educational, though not necessarily in the way anyone intended.
By the fifth week, the same eight counts. The same dancers. The same UPS driver. Somewhere between repetition and revelation, I became convinced there had to be a better version of line dancing.
What eventually became Steers & Queers started with a simple frustration. The legendary country nights were gone. The crowds had scattered. The gay dancers had their spaces. The straight dancers had theirs. Everybody seemed to be dancing somewhere, but very few people seemed to be dancing together.
I wasn’t trying to build a business. I wasn’t trying to build a brand. I was trying to build a room.
A little Tom of Finland. A little Marlboro Man. A little country. A little gay. A little ridiculous.
People came. Then more people came. Friendships formed. The rodeo found us. Fundraisers followed. The republic became real. What started with a handful of dancers eventually became a genuine community. For a brief moment it felt like we had built something uniquely ours.
Like most republics, however, it eventually became more complicated than it was ever intended to be. Expectations arrived. Politics arrived. Committees arrived. The recreational escape slowly acquired administrative duties.
Most of what remains from those years is what I affectionately call my gaggle of gays—the leftovers, the loyalists, the refugees from a republic that no longer exists. When Steers & Queers disappeared, the friendships remained. The venue changed. The crowd changed. The geography changed. The people largely stayed the same. And we rode off into the sunset on our final night singing "Happy Trails" by Roy Rogers.
For a while I thought we might rebuild it somewhere else. We tried. The truth was that what we had created belonged to a specific moment, a specific room, and a specific collection of personalities. Some things don’t survive relocation. They’re not supposed to. All good things eventually become stories.
These days you’ll usually find us somewhere near the edge of the room. Years ago we were trying to build our own little niche inside the country scene. Now we’d rather be the token gays in somebody else’s. The republic ended. The citizenship remained.
Working at Boot Barn taught me something I didn’t understand at the time. Most people don’t buy boots because they need boots. They buy boots because they need somewhere to wear them.
The smell hit you first: leather, rubber, conditioner, fresh denim. Years later I can still walk into a country bar and conduct inventory without meaning to. That’s Idyllwind. That’s Cody James. Those exotics didn’t come from California. Those were expensive.
The boots tell stories long before their owners do.
One of the strange side effects of becoming the Boot Barn guy was gaining access to the machinery behind the curtain. That exclusive bandana everyone seemed to own? There’s a decent chance it found its way onto your head because I had a box of them sitting in the stockroom. The raffle prize everybody spent the evening trying to win? It might have been tickets to a show I was producing the following weekend. People assume influence is glamorous. In reality, it usually looks like cardboard boxes.
I watched people spend hundreds of dollars on their first pair and treat the decision with the seriousness of a constitutional amendment. Photos were taken. Friends were consulted. Text messages were exchanged. At the time I assumed we were discussing footwear. Years later, I suspect we were discussing courage.
The boots were never the point. The point was where the boots were going: a dance class, a first date, a country night, a rodeo, a room full of strangers.
The woman buying her first pair of boots wasn’t purchasing leather. She was purchasing permission—permission to enter the room, permission to participate, permission to imagine herself as the sort of person who belonged there.
What eventually occurred to me is that I wasn’t observing anything I wasn’t participating in. The Plastics fascinated me because I recognized something familiar. The newcomer fascinated me because I recognized something familiar. My friend checking his hair before speaking to a man he found attractive fascinated me because I recognized something familiar.
For all my observations, I possess the same insecurities as everyone else in the room.
For a brief moment, I had the thing people spend years chasing: visibility.
More often I was the Boot Barn guy. Less often I was the Country Night guy. And for one deeply confusing year, I was Mr. Palm Springs Hot Rodeo 2025—which, in retrospect, was a spectacularly educational mistake.
These days I’m mostly the guy who knows all the instructors, DJs, producers, rivalries, and drama, yet somehow still gets introduced as somebody’s best friend. More commonly, somebody mistakes me for my best friend’s boyfriend. I’ve stopped correcting them. The explanation is usually longer than the misunderstanding.
I still know the instructors, DJs, producers, rivalries, and who isn't speaking to whom. I've accumulated an unreasonable amount of country-dancing trivia without ever intending to.
What nobody tells you about standing in the center of the room is that eventually everybody starts throwing things at it.
The politics arrived. The criticism arrived. The expectations arrived. The people who desperately wanted the title arrived.
For years I assumed confidence came from standing in the center of the room. Then I finally stood there and discovered it wasn’t for me.
What surprised me most wasn’t getting those things. It was discovering I didn’t particularly want them. I didn’t want the spotlight. I liked helping the person standing just outside of it: the instructor trying to get a class off the ground, the newcomer trying to gather courage, the friend trying to work up the nerve to talk to the bartender, the little old man determined to learn a dance he was convinced he couldn’t learn.
That’s why I prefer the edge of the room—not because I think I’m above any of it, but because the view is better from there. The center of every republic is crowded with self-appointed celebrities, local legends, aspiring legends, and people convinced the fate of civilization depends on whether everyone properly executes a grapevine.
The edge is where the stories are. It’s where somebody is learning their first dance, somebody is working up the courage to ask for a phone number, and somebody is quietly wondering if they’re dressed correctly.
It’s also where you’ll find me explaining saddle soap to a stranger who never asked. Some poor soul will spend three hundred dollars on a pair of boots and before the evening is over I’ll be discussing leather conditioner, cedar boot trees, and why leaving them in a Palm Springs parking lot constitutes a crime against craftsmanship. Meanwhile my friend is trying to get the bartender’s phone number and wondering where I disappeared to.
If there’s one thing the country scene has taught me, it’s that confidence and insecurity are often dancing partners. The pageantry, the politics, the rivalries, the rhinestones, the boots, the titles, the republics—they’re all different expressions of the same human desire.
Everybody wants to belong.
Everybody wants to be noticed.
Everybody wants proof they’re enough.
There’s humor in all of it, especially once you realize you’re participating in the same performance. The only difference is that some people get rhinestones and some people get a notebook. Either way, we all show up again next week hoping we’ve finally mastered the dance.
Most of the time, we’re really trying to master ourselves.
The Valley has a way of changing its venues. Legendary places disappear. Crowds migrate. Republics collapse. New ones emerge. What remains are the people—still trying, still showing up, still becoming.
Five, six, seven, eight.
And suddenly everyone is moving in the same direction.