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 Not
That Boy
By Marsha
Proser Cohen
One
father's journey to acceptance of his dancing son
Peter
Chursin wanted a stereotypical boy, one who played basketball,
baseball, football.
Chursin had
grown up in a traditional home where boys did boy things. Like
most fathers, he wanted to roughhouse and play catch with his
son. He wanted a little athlete who would be just like him.
But his son, Peter John, was not that boy. From a young age he
seemed bored with sports. He wanted to dance.
When Peter
John was around 5, his mother enrolled him in a tap class.
Although Chursin didn’t like it, he didn’t take it too
seriously, thinking it was something his son would soon
abandon. But it wasn’t. Peter John walked into the dance
studio and discovered himself. He found something he liked and
was good at. He found a passion that many never find in a
lifetime.
Chursin
couldn’t deal with a dancing son. “I was embarrassed,” he
says. The better at dancing Peter John became, the more
Chursin resented it. His son was supposed to be athletic, not
a sissy, which was how he perceived male dancers. “Peter John
knew how I felt,” Chursin said, “and when he was about 7 or 8,
he’d pirouette in front of me while I was trying to watch
football. ‘Get the hell outta here,’ I’d yell. ‘Go do that in
your room or outside.’ ” Peter John would leave the room but
return to pirouette between his father and the television
again and again. Like most kids, he wanted his father’s
attention—even negative attention.
For Chursin,
the situation seemed to get worse and worse. To him, Peter
John should have been out throwing a ball with his friends,
but instead he was practicing dance moves. Chursin couldn’t
talk about it with his friends. He knew what they’d say.
“If I told
them my kid hit 300, it would have been different. But if I
told them he was dancing, they would have just said, ‘Oh,
really,’ and I didn’t want to go there. They had no idea what
I was going through, and I didn’t want them telling me to look
at it this way or that way.”
Because his
family knew how he felt, they said nothing, and Chursin
remained alone in what he calls “his own dark world.” Peter
John appeared to want his father’s approval, but when it
didn’t come, he continued dancing without his father’s
blessing.
“He played
soccer for a while,” Chursin said, “but I think it was just to
please me.” The day Chursin took his son pheasant hunting was
the day things started to change.
“Peter John
was around 10 years old. I shot a bird, but it wasn’t a clean
kill. By the time I got to it, he had picked up the bird and
was petting it.” Chursin was convinced that his son would
never want to go hunting again. He explained that the bird was
suffering and would die anyway, so it needed to be killed.
When Peter John asked how, his father told him to grab it by
the head and wring its neck. And Peter John did just that. “It
shocked me,” Chursin says, “but I said, ‘Oh, good job.’ ”
When their
next shot also failed to kill the bird, Peter John ran up to
it and wrung its neck. As they were driving home, Chursin
asked his son if he had had fun.
“This was
cool,” Peter John said. “Let’s do it again.”
Shortly
after that hunting trip, Chursin went to a dance competition.
Although he had seen him dance before, he saw his son – really
saw him – in his element, and, perhaps for the first time,
began to realize who his son was.
“That’s
when he made me accept him,” Chursin says. “I watched him
dance and saw that he was head and shoulders above the rest.
He was incredibly smooth—his style, his fluidity. I’m still
amazed by his fluidity. It was an awakening for me.”
Chursin
began to understand his son. He remembered the hunting
experience and connected it to dance. “Hunting is competitive,
and I think [Peter John] liked it because he could relate to
the competitive element. Dance is competitive, and like
hunting, requires focus,” Chursin says. He asked Peter John
what it was like being on the stage.
“Dad, you
zone in,” Peter John replied.
Chursin
began to see similarities between dance and athletic
competitions. He began to understand that dance requires
making the right moves at the right time, controlling the body
and the mind. As he began to see dance as athletic and to
realize how talented his son was, he was able to begin to
accept his son’s choice. “Just because you want [kids] to be
one thing doesn’t mean they will. You can push them only so
far. Kids aren’t going to follow the path you choose unless
they want to go there,” says Chursin. “What I took to be
negative stuff was just Peter John’s way of telling me all
those years who he really was. When I saw his passion, it
clicked in. This is who the kid is. My idea of athletics was
basketball, baseball, and football. But now I see this kid
who’s athletic at 10 and doing his own thing.”
The thought
that his son might be homosexual was also a factor in his
attitude toward Peter John’s dancing, Chursin now realizes.
“Maybe I was naïve. Every parent wants a normal, safe life for
his kid. I don’t know of any parent that wants his child to be
gay, but [if he is], he will always be my kid. He’s my son. I
love him.”
Today
Chursin not only recognizes his son’s accomplishments but is
proud of them. “Peter John is a talented kid. But passion and
hard work got him where he is. He didn’t just show up and
succeed. He worked. He has a strong work ethic. If he had a
job in the corporate world, he would be the type to work 80
hours a week to make it perfect. Dance taught him that. Dance
gave him discipline and focus.”
“Maturation,” Chursin says, “made me more open-minded [about
male dancers], and Peter John, and dance played a part in
that. I didn’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to
think a different way.’ ”
When
Chursin looked at his son and said, “He’s good. How did he get
here?” he realized he had missed much of his 10-yearold’s
childhood. As focused as he was on his own feelings, Chursin
never realized what he was putting his son through. “I was
33,” he says, “when I started to figure it out.”
Peter John
is now 20 years old, dancing in the Broadway touring company
production of Wicked and dating a former Rockette and
Mavericks cheerleader. “We don’t spend much time together,”
says Chursin. “I missed a big part of his life.” With regret
in his voice, he cites the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the
Cradle,” about a father who was always too busy to spend time
with his son. “I missed a big part of his life. Now he’s too
busy for me.”
Although
father and son do get an occasional chance to go fishing or
simply spend time together, Chursin has given Peter John
something even more valuable: acceptance of his choice to
dance.
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