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erin vachon
on
(3) Patrick Swayze ft Wendy Fraser, “She’s Like the wind”

(march fadness 80s edition)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun but at times cruel tournament! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). For 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read.

The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look.

There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering.

The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above).

We hope these great essays will again earn your love.

Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

My Swayze ode to queer failure lost to Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life” in 2023. I sort of expected it. In trans community, there’s an unwritten rule about our early narratives, an effort to de-center their importance alongside the wariness of exploitation. Yes, you’ll experience early turbulence, but please shut the fuck up about it. In the unveiling of disapproving faces across the gender spectrum, losing to Talk Talk was the next Russian doll. I failed at writing about failure, my gay ouroboros. Re-reading the moment where I self-shame in my kitchen does feel raw. I was still looking for permission to lead my life, maybe in the March Fadness poll, too. I was scared of exclusion, not only by cis people, but queer community as well. I wanted to get transness right. That was the real failure. There was no earning my way into acceptance, no loving montage of transphobic relationships overhauled by what a good trans person I was, and no gold star that a queer elder would place upon my forehead. Naively, especially as a white person, I did not anticipate the bigotry. In the kitchen, I looked at the person I loved for decades, hoping he would say that nothing changed. Of course, everything had and did. Thank god. When people hedge that you’re still the same person after you come out, this is a statement to temper fear. To make others feel cozy in their patterns, an assurance that they don’t have to change themselves. But trans people are proof that everything needs to shift, and a reminder that humans are shifting all the time anyway. I relinquished the cis-het relation to my partner from the essay, but salvaged the relationship. He and I still live as platonic companions. The support is solid, hyper-conventional or weirdly unconventional, depending on who you ask. We’re both happy. When I told this once to someone I was dating, admittedly self-consciously, they replied, Actually, that sounds pretty gay. Right now in the U.S., just the words “gender ideology” are a threat. They’re making laws that will erase and criminalize and kill us. I suspect that’s because when you accept yourself down to your bones, not just in word, but in your lived body, all rules become slippery, and you’re activated to change more and more. It’s not always popular or pretty. I count the 2023 essay as a win, even if it didn’t win the vote. The beauty of being queer is the awareness that we’re all making this stuff up anyway. So you get up and fail. You get up and fail. You get up and fail. Soon the daily rhythm becomes less wobbly, even gorgeous. Look, you’re dancing. —Erin Vachon, March 2025

erin vachon on “she’s like the wind”

Toward the end of the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, Johnny and Baby are parting at the summer resort. Johnny, fired for their relationship. Baby, sentenced to stay with her Sears-portrait family and play Parcheesi every afternoon. They laugh about their passionate adventure, Baby saying, "I guess we surprised everybody," and Johnny replying, "I guess we did." Baby headbutts Johnny's stomach in tender gesture, and he kisses her wild curls. Johnny says he'll, "Never be sorry," and Baby says, "Neither will I." They kiss, and he drives off in his black '57 Chevy, kicking up a dirt cloud behind him. She watches the car descend over the hill, ballet flats scuffing the ground. "She's Like the Wind" swells over the scene, Patrick Swayze singing, "Living without her / I'd go insane," as his character Johnny leaves, both of them solo, and then Baby is alone.

It's the late 90's, and I'm running away from my family's house to jump into a Jeep Cherokee, clumsy footed in flapping army navy jacket and torn Converse. My best friend drives stick shift in a buckled and chained leather jacket, and we cross state lines, down Route 95 to the late-night diner, where harried waitresses scoff at customers who choose to sit in the non-smoking section. His jacket is warm, and so is he. We are both running from religious restriction in our family and community, sanitization sold as love. In the footwell of the Jeep, I find a ripped black and white photograph of him standing in front of his last car, a slick black Cadillac. We stay partners for over twenty years, first as friends, then lovers, then spouses, watching Dirty Dancing for comfort on all of our couches, and a photo of him in his younger rebel days hangs on the wall of our house, spiked hooks in his ears and nose and lip, until, one day, I gently take it down.

My very first encounter with Dirty Dancing was in the late 80s, plastic VHS on a cheap wire rack at an indie rental store. A line of videos in fixed rows, one after another. Then, boom: ecstatic bodies grinding, not even hidden behind the velvet curtain at the back of the shop. I wasn't tall enough to reach the case, just a kid. Like a Baby holding a watermelon, following some wisecrack guy into a dance hall, I was enthralled by the way limbs smushed together and confused why anything so beautiful could be shameful.
In the film, Baby follows Billy as he pops open that dancehall door with his butt, juggling melons, and the bacchanalia beyond is delicious and sweaty and filthy. It's a stark contrast to the capitalist model enforced by the summer resort, which insists on the containment of desire. "They shouldn't be showing off with each other," the boss's nephew says. "That's not going to sell lessons."
I've rewatched Dirty Dancing countless times, but last year, I kept pausing the dancehall scenes. "Queer people," I yelled. "There are queer people dancing back there." Same-sex couples grinding, butch on femme, hands on curved hips. An open secret, that the film held gender swaps the whole time, and how odd, I hadn't noticed before then. Out as queer for decades, I started self-identifying as gender-fluid a few months before. So, when the boss's nephew expresses irritation with the staff's desire, I heard encoded speech: "Don't push your pronouns or your lifestyle in the customer's face."
In their backroom dancing, I saw flickers of queer love and pleasure, unmonitored and rebellious. I also saw mass shootings at gay clubs because queer joy was the highest threat to capitalism, to white nationalism, to right-wing religious fascism. Such desire has always needed containment, and shame was its oldest weapon, even at cinematic summer resorts.

When Johnny leaves the resort, the community has not put him under pressure to leave. His fellow dancers love him, revere him as a leader. The Big Boss Man is threatened by Johnny's sensuality: those hips and his lips hold sexual power. Baby privately flourishes at the resort, not under Johnny, but alongside him as partner, through what he gives her permission to be in her body: an adult, desiring and rebellious. Sexual, yes, but also an activist on the ground, more immediate than her Peace Corps dreams or "monks burning themselves in protest."
The initial spark that ignites Baby and Johnny's love story isn't dance, but an ethical call to action. His regular dance partner needs an abortion, and Baby steps into her high-heeled shoes. Love rises out of their rigorous daily practice, showing up day after day for a common cause. While Johnny teaches Baby how to dance in sultry, sweaty montages, Baby teaches Johnny how to care about the larger world. "I've never known anybody like you," he says to Baby, "You look at the world and you think you can make it better."
Johnny may be shameless as a rebel, but he still sings guilt-stricken over Baby: "Can't look in her eyes / She's out of my league." bell hooks writes, "We can only move from perfect passion to perfect love when the illusions pass and we are able to use the energy and intensity generated by intense, overwhelming, erotic bonding to heighten self-discovery." If dance and activism intertwine as intimate mambo partners in the film, desire is the shared language between the two, the reason why Swayze yearns: "She doesn't know what she's done." Johnny returns for the last dance, self-actualized, because Baby has made him truly shameless.
But in order to get from Point A to Point B, first, Swayze has to sing all his fears and insecurities out loud.

This month, on a rewatch, I looked for those same-sex couples in the dancehall scenes and could only find boys that looked like dykes. A mirage. I saw what I needed to see in the dancing, and just like that, their gorgeous movements slipped from my hands a little, like wind. Not mine to hold at all.
I want to claim Dirty Dancing as a queer narrative.
Of course, it's not.
At least, not explicitly.
Baby in her pink dress and Johnny in his black pants at the end, man and woman, fulfill the heteronormative romance narrative. Johnny takes Baby's hand from her father at the end, and ownership transfers, man to man. Maybe that's why I keep returning to "She's Like the Wind," just before the final dance, and Swayze's broody preoccupation with loss, his emo concern with not being good enough. I'm chewing on the last carrion call of transition: shaking off dysphoria inside suburban American life.

Like many semi-femme queer folx, I re-read bell hooks' All About Love this autumn. Every few pages, I flipped back to the table of contents, eyeing the oncoming chapter on romantic love. "Help," I whispered to bell. "I'm in a bit of a mess.”
I'm not sure that I'm the right person to write about a love song at this stage of life, approaching uncoupling with my life-partner of over twenty years. He's a cis dude, the very best of them, but I'm queer as fuck, gender-fluid, and getting goopier by the minute. The love between us remains, maybe even grows. Otherwise, I've fumbled through ethical nonmonogamy on two left feet, but mostly fallen flat on my face. My old standby Dirty Dancing doesn't offer the same comfort as it once did, at least not at first glance. If you loved and loved with your full beating heart ("Guh-Gung, Guh-Gung," as Johnny says), the big dance number is supposed to be inevitable at the end.
The cis-hets promised.
Blueprints don't exist for our love story in mainstream media, no big ending. No one taught my partner and I how to dance through the steps, so we improvised.
Something deflated in me when I found out that Swayze originally co-wrote "She's Like the Wind" with Stacy Widelitz in 1984 for Grandview, U.S.A., a bizarre, mostly out-of-print film where Jaime Lee Curtis and a high school student fall in love. Swayze plays her jilted lover. When they didn't use the song for the film, he pitched it to Dirty Dancing as a backup plan. "What about Baby?" I thought. I wanted to fix the song to the place it rightfully belonged, tack it down solid with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, bind them to each other in dancehall eternity. Except, it turns out, the two of them had no chemistry on set. Their love story was rumored to be flat offscreen.
Recently I found myself saying that the relationship between me and my partner is one of the huge achievements in my life. We've each undone unhealthy or abusive patterns lodged into the deep meat and muscles of our respective pasts, learned to communicate, and love each other well. I've learned to trust my own abilities with a dance partner, tighten my spaghetti arms and hold my frame, strengthening my solo dance. Still, I am fighting the traitorous feeling of failure, driving off before the big number at the end.
Jack Halberstam writes, "The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being." Cultural narratives teach us to feel shame around our failures and our desires, but queer logic urges us on: fuck, dance, and go down in flames. Shame is a voyeuristic wallflower outside of ourselves, a way of keeping us from moving as fluid creatures, from realizing that we are filled with as much power and energy as the wind.

Swayze co-wrote "She's Like the Wind" for his wife, Lisa Niemi, who he was with for 34 years, until his death in 2009 at 57 of pancreatic cancer. When Swayze's Point Break brother, Keanu Reeves, caught the cultural zeitgeist wave, lifted up in Netflix cameos and playing with puppies in interviews, I thought, "Swayze would rise like this too, if he were still alive." Maybe even higher, fully appreciated for To Wong Foo and his ballet training, vulnerabilities that ripened a smidge early. I deeply mourn Swayze's passing and wonder what synchronous gifts he would offer us to understand masculinity anew.
At the moment we lose sight of Johnny as he drives over the hill, Swayze's voice lingers like a ghost. He sings, "Feel her breath in my face / Her body close to me," over a montage of Baby pining, gazing off into the distance on a cabin porch, then leaning for comfort on her sister's shoulder. But as Johnny visually drives off, Swayze rises up in another form, in song. Johnny's musical yearning is as present as telepathy from the moment that the lovers go separate ways.
If the song is meant to signal loss, Swayze's ephemerality, like the energy exchanged in movement, or sex, or love, isn't ever truly lost so much as converted. Like the wind, you can't hold onto the experience and clutch it safe, only ride through it, like a dance. 
Swayze wrote about his wife as wind in his song, fleeting and ungraspable, even though history tells us he held onto her for his entire life. Love understood this way is transformative because it insists upon action, loving as verb rather than noun. bell hooks writes, “How different things might be if...instead of saying 'I am in love" we said 'I am loving' or 'I will love.'"
When he passed away, Swayze's wife wrote in her memoir that his last words to her were, "I love you."

So in a moment that feels like true failure, (forgive me for exposing this ugly cis-het movie script) after a night of reading transphobic hate speech on social media, most of it by colleagues inside the writing community, feeling exhausted from trying to live shamelessly, unapologetically, I find myself standing in my kitchen, apologizing to my partner while pasta boils on the stove, saying, "I’m sorry I’m not just a woman," and my head butts his stomach, he puts his hand on my head and says, "Never be sorry," and I know that is another way of saying, "I am loving," but then, furious at confining myself to some self-hating corner, I raise my head to say, "Yeah, actually, I’m not sorry at all," and I kiss the top of his curls, because that is another way of saying, "I am loving as dancer now," and then I am truly lifted, because I am lifting: such wind takes us so much higher than arms alone. 

Swayze sings "She's Like the Wind" in the penultimate scene of the movie, and like everyone with a broken heart, Johnny probably feels he's at the end. Sure, the viewer anticipates the big lift, Baby soaring with swan-winged arms, triumphant with his support. But Johnny can't see the resolution, not as a protagonist stuck on a linear timeline, his character arc plotted out on a fixed course. He's just driving away, broken-hearted.
Feeling at my own end, I pulled my tarot cards every morning for months, and the reversed Fool kept flipping out. Upright, the fool is a new beginning. I often read tarot card reversals as resistance. Over and over, my cards accused me of refusing to leap into the future. If Swayze croons about being "Just a fool to believe," my tarot asked me, "Why aren't you a fool to believe?" In order to get to the big number, you have to let go, Swayze counsels us. Love is not a single ending, but a series of wild steps that double back, again and again. So let the wind take what it will. Soon, there will be another dance party.

Erin Vachon is the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large for The Rumpus and Senior Reviews Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. They write and edit outside Providence, RI.