Here I was at the University of Chicago about to end my short career as a ballet dancer. My blind friend, Robert Walz (a portrait of him in the framed picture) had just been killed in a head-on car crash. And my Chaucer professor would not grant me time to attend the funeral so I stayed up all night with a friend typing my term paper and got downgraded. Not a good time.Then I made a radical decision. Having listened to my father whisper "doctor" in my ear since the cradle, I decided finally to apply to medical school. I had to quickly pack in pre-med courses: physics, quantitative (chemical) analysis, calculus, etc. I took the MCATs and got in. A hero's journey—like my little hero Panzil. Years before I had stumbled into ballet while struggling with piano lessons. I was attending the Detroit Institute of Musical Arts and, after a chance meeting with the ballet master, got diverted into the ballet studio.Initially, I thought it was great exercise until I saw my first ballet. I was stunned, maybe horrified, that ballet was not just a series of increasingly difficult and demanding exercises but a theatrical art with costumes and scenery and make-up. Later my school formed a repertory company and that was when I first performed in a ballet, Cinderella by Prokofiev.After I went off to medical school I continued taking ballet classes. It was the only form of exercise I knew and the only one I was half-way good at. Ninety minutes of aerobics, stretch and strengthening a few times a week. Under the strict supervision of a teacher—good for an exercise-lax person like me. 

"The sissy view of men in ballet has radically changed."

."Ballet is woman," George Balanchine, the great Russian-born choreographer declared. Between 1933 and his death in 1983 he established the New York City Ballet and its feeder institution, the School of American Ballet. He also created a huge repertory of contemporary ballets. Most of these masterpieces were built around women. He made them leaner, faster, with higher leg extension and astounding pointe work.Men were slow to enter ballet studios in America, but that process was accelerated by the arrival of Rudolf Nureyev in the 1960s and Mikhael Baryshnikov in the 1970s. The sissy view of men in ballet has radically changed. Two men of the New York City Ballet were also instrumental in raising the image of the male dancer: Jacques D'Amboise, and Edward Villella.To the general public, being a male ballet dancer was equivalent to declaring oneself homosexual. While ballet may have been a safe refuge for gay men, the truth is that the majority of male ballet dancers today are straight.It is ironic, too, that of all the athleticisms—almost every sport, even the companion women sports,—ballet has resisted the diffusion of gender roles. Men do not dance on pointe. The big jumps, especially those with multiple turns in the air, are the preserve of male dancers. And men still provide the cavalier role: they lift women and support them as they balance and turn on pointe.Contemporary choreographers often take women off pointe and explore dance equipoise between male and female. Yet they continue to explore the inexhaustible dramatic potential of the pas-de-deux, the differential coupling of man and woman, even undertaking same-sex pairings.Athleticism in ballet is hidden behind a performative attitude of ease. A male dancer will hurl himself into the air, traveling high and far and often turning twice in mid-air, then landing with legs crisscrossing (the ballet leg “beats”). But, unlike an Olympian broad jumper or discus thrower, the dancer’s effort is hidden, embedded in his striving for grace and elegance and musicality.Unlike many sports, dance does not play rough. Competition in ballet is subsumed into the dance studio and even there it is never physical. The edge is always visible: superior ability.Sports require a limited, circumscribed movement repertory. Ballet dancers train assiduously for ten years before stepping on stage. And the dancer’s movement vocabulary is immense. Additionally, a dancer must assimilate choreography and perform in the company of many others. It's teamwork radically refined.Men may never collectively come to love ballet. It is perhaps too bloodless and too beautiful. It is their loss. Martha Graham, herself a choreographer who never quite knew what to do with male dancers, nonetheless understood their preeminent place. All dancers, she rightfully decreed—and this especially includes men—are "acrobats of God."