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• ACT OUT Photography by Jim Norrena
• [Left to right] Former Madonna dancers and stars of Strike a Pose: Oliver Crumes III, Salim Gauwloos, Kevin Stea, Carlton Wilborn, and Luis Camacho once tap danced around certain truths.

Madonna’s feature-length rockumentary Truth or Dare spotlighted many of the Queen of Pop’s sexy song-and-dance numbers from her 1990 Blond Ambition Tour. But it was what director Alek Keshishian captured offstage that truly curled mainstream America’s toes and almost garnered the film an X rating. For the seven male dancers — six gay and one straight — that made up Madonna’s dance troupe, however, certain truths were still too shocking to reveal.  It took 25 years, but today they’re ready to tell all in a new documentary about the truths behind Truth or Dare, entitled Strike a Pose.

SF Weekly caught up with the band of “brothers,” Luis Camacho, Salim Gauwloos, Kevin Stea, Carlton Wilborn, and Oliver Crumes III, between a Macy’s in-store appearance and their film’s Frameline premiere on June 25, about the secrets that they didn’t dare expose.

There’s a pink elephant in the room that I can no longer ignore. Where is your fellow dancer Jose Gutierez?

Salim Gauwloos: He has some work in New York, so he couldn’t be here.

Switching gears, when Madonna first decided to document her Blond Ambition Tour, did she have a specific purpose in mind outside of just showcasing life on the road? Was she pushing an alternate view of the gay community?

Carlton Wilborn: There was never a conversation with her in regards to the purpose of that particular tour at all. All that we knew was that at some point she wanted to film the life that we were having when we were on the road, and it was just an organic catching of all of who we were and what our experience was.

Kevin Stea: I think she knew very well that she was pulling from the gay nightclub scene in New York and presenting that. Also, her friend world was filled with gay people, and her experience of gay people is that we are normal, friends, human, and the people around you.

It was also a collaborative thing going on with her and Alek Keshishian. Alek is also gay, and I think it was within their conversations. You can see his vision of the movie and his message just as much as hers, so I think he probably influences a lot of that.

One thing that’s certain, according to statements made in Truth or Dare and Strike a Pose, is that the late Gabriel Trupin was Madonna’s favorite dancer. Why?

CW: He was all of our favorites. He was the favorite child.

Oliver, you were not everyone’s favorite off the bat. In Truth or Dare you come off as very homophobic, yet today you embrace the gay community wholeheartedly. What was the turning point for you?

Oliver Crumes III: The day of the Vogue photo shoot. It opened my eyes up. I kind of adjusted, but I didn’t really get to know everybody. We began rehearsing before the “Vogue” video, and it took time. We weren’t close in the beginning, but as the tour went on, I learned everything about everybody.

So was your claim in Truth or Dare that your fellow dancers were all after you true or not?

OC: No. But anyway, I love them. I found out the reason that they are who they are. I found out about their whole lives, and from then on, I went from being ignorant to being mature about it. They turned my life around.

SG: He was also young, and imagine being stuck in a room for one year with six queens.

OC: It was hard, but they made me stronger.

Read the full interview at SFWeekly.com

OOSTERBEEK Filmhuis Oosterbeek vertoont op donderdag 7 juli de muziekdocumentaire Strike a pose, over het leven van de dansers van Madonna na de succesvolle Blond Ambition-tour.

Uitzinnig werd er tijdens de legendarische Blond Ambition-tour met spandoeken gezwaaid. Daarop was niet alleen de naam van Madonna te lezen, maar ook die van Luis, Oliver, Salim, Jose, Kevin, Carlton en Gabriel. De dansers uit de show waren wereldwijd iconen voor de homo-emancipatie. In Strike a pose blikken zes van hen terug op die roerige periode. Nummer zeven uit de groep kon er niet meer bij zijn: Gabriel overleed in 1995 aan AIDS. Een tragisch verhaal, zeker gezien de vergeefse worstelingen die hij na de tour voerde met het management van Madonna. Toch is Strike a pose er niet om de popster zwart te maken. De dansers zijn nog altijd onverdeeld trots op wat ze hebben mogen doen. Maar intussen willen ze ook hun eigen verhaal kwijt. Deze docu gaat over wat er zich afspeelde buiten het licht van de schijnwerpers. Een leven waarvan alleen de pieken bekend werden, terwijl de dalen net zo ingrijpend zijn geweest. Nadat de dansers daar los van elkaar openhartig over hebben verteld, brengen de filmmakers hen voor het eerst sinds de tour in 1990 weer samen, om ze te laten praten over oude herinneringen. Dat gesprek vormt dan niet alleen de climax van een serie aangrijpende interviews, maar laat de kijker ook getuige zijn van hoe de mannen na 25 jaar de cirkel rondmaken. Reserveren voor deze documentaire is aan te raden en kan via www.filmhuisoosterbeek.nl.

Meer op Hoogenlaag.nl

Congratulations to Ester Gould, Reijer Zwaan and the stars of ‘Strike a Pose’ for receiving 10.000 visitors in Dutch film theaters! Ester Gould, Reijer Zwaan and producer Rosan Boersma were given the ‘Crystal Film’ award yesterday to celebrate its success on behalf of the Dutch Film Festival and Dutch Film Fund.

If you still haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for?

Gabriel Trupin was a gifted San Francisco dancer who performed on Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition Tour and, along with two other dancers, later sued her for not getting their permission or paying them for appearing in her 1991 backstage documentary, “Truth or Dare.”

Trupin, who pleaded with Madonna not to use the now-famous footage of him kissing fellow dancer Salim Gauwloos (mainly because he didn’t want his boyfriend to see it) received a settlement from the singer that allowed him to live well until he died of AIDS in 1995 at age 26. His mother, Sue Trupin, speaks for him in the new Dutch documentary “Strike a Pose,” which screens Saturday, June 25, at the Castro Theatre as part of the LGBTQ Film Festival.

“What’s lovely about this movie is that it’s not at all about Madonna, it’s about what happened to these guys,” says Trupin, a retired nurse who worked at San Francisco General Hospital’s infection disease clinic for years and now teaches smoking cessation at UCSF. She was married to the late, great drummer and composer Eddie Marshall, who wrote a tune called “Genius Sue.”

Trupin was always bored by “Truth or Dare,” a film her son clearly didn’t relish participating in but to which he could hardly say no, given the plum job with Madonna. She never knew until she attended the recent Tribeca Film Festival premiere of “Strike a Pose” just how important “Truth or Dare” had been to gay men’s self-acceptance and validation.

“Gabriel didn’t want to be known for that kiss. He wanted to be known for his dancing,” says Trupin, who said she loved the way filmmakers Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan wove the stories of the surviving six male Blond Ambition dancers (Oliver Crumes, the only straight and not-classically-trained one, is now a waiter and hip-hop dance teacher in Las Vegas).

Working with Madonna was a great gig “but wasn’t supposed to be the pinnacle of his career. … He wanted to live and be a dancer; doing ‘Truth or Dare’ was her agenda. But that kiss ended up being very important. People hadn’t seen that onscreen before.”

Gabriel Trupin, who didn’t play to the camera like some of his associates, “didn’t want to carry a flag or be an advocate. That’s not who he was at 20,” Sue Trupin says. “He wasn’t there yet. He just wanted to get paid. But I’m positive that if Gabriel had lived, he would have come to be extremely proud of the role that film played in helping gay men around the world. It’s ironic that this kiss he didn’t want to be known for ended up being an incredibly noble legacy, in a way.”

Trupin couldn’t believe the reception she and the remaining six dancers got when they came onstage after a New York screening of “Strike a Pose.” People were standing and shouting, “Thank you!”

The dancers are now approaching 50, and “they’re a lot more interesting now than they were in ‘Truth or Dare,’ when they had nothing to say,” Sue Trupin says. “What happens when you have that fame at 20 and then it starts to fade? It’s a very moving story, and very well told.”
For more information, go to www.frameline.org.