Departing gay male Atlanta Hawks dancer feels pride about his 5-season run
Growing up in Miami there were two clear choices for Calvin Brown: sports or dance.
He wanted to emulate his older brother Curtis, who played football, baseball and basketball. So Brown chose track and field and basketball.
But all that changed when Brown saw what his cousin TK Owens was doing. A former Miami Heat dancer, Owens later opened her own dance school and in the process showed Brown a path to a creative career.
As early as the sixth grade Brown knew he wanted to be a dancer.
“I want to do this for the rest of my life,” Brown thought. “I want to perform.”
Now after five seasons as a dancer with the ATL Dancers, Brown — who helped open doors for other male and LGBTQ dancers — is striking out on his own to pursue his original dream that brought him to Atlanta, to dance in music videos and on tour. He’s also bringing back his podcast, “Beyond the Lockers: Pro Edition,” which offers guidance for aspiring NBA and NFL dancers.
Brown’s path to the Hawks was defined by tenacity, taking chances and the encouragement of a loving family for what others might view as an unconventional career. Brown was buoyed by the other dancers in his family like his younger sister Nakera, who went on to coach the Tampa Bay Titan Dancers, and his supportive mother, Anita, who acted as the family’s chauffeur, travel planner and no-nonsense cheerleader for her kids.
She just expected one thing: “I don’t want nobody to say that you look sloppy or you didn’t look like you didn’t want to be here,” she told Brown. “Make sure you put on a show whenever you dance.”
Brown spent his formative early years majoring in drama and dance in both high school and college at Miami’s New World School of the Arts. In 2014, he took a leap of faith and joined the Miami Marlins dance team that included a large number of male dancers.
Always anxious to take his career to the next level, in 2019 he booked a one-way ticket to Washington, D.C., to audition for the Washington Wizards, another coed dance team.
He called his mother to tell her he needed to stay two weeks as part of the audition process and would then only have one month to find a place to live and move if he was accepted on the team.
“Just take it one day at a time,” she reassured him. “Let’s see what happens.”
“I did what I had to do. I fought for my spot, and I ended up making the team,” said Brown.
When he eventually made it onto the Hawks team in 2021, it felt like the next natural step in an ascendent career.
Brown’s infectiously positive attitude never flags even when describing some difficult moments in his Hawks career.
When he joined the ATL Dancers, there hadn’t been a man on the Hawks dance team in 18 years. And certain fans struggled to connect with a gay male dancer, Brown said.
They would ask the team if they could get a photo with them, but would then indicate they just wanted a photo with just the women dancers. Sometimes they would hand him the camera to take the photo, making Brown feel like an outsider on his own team. Brown had thick skin. But, still.
“This is how the world is,” he said. “But at the same time I was like, wow, this low-key hurts my feelings.”
Some of the most hurtful moments came when Brown, who loves children, first joined the Hawks. He would hear parents say they didn’t want him in photos with their child.
“It was an adjustment, a little hurtful adjustment at first, but then I kind of grew into it,” Brown said.
Chenise Johnson joined the Hawks dance team in 2020 and said she and Brown quickly jumped from co-workers to friends.
She watched what Brown went through. “Sometimes that could sting at the heart, but he took that in stride, and he was like, ‘OK, well, I’m gonna prove to them that I belong,’” Johnson said.
Eventually the novelty of a male dancer wore off and Brown said, “It got way, way better.”
His fellow dancers also rallied around him, telling fans who wanted him to step out of photos, “He’s a part of the team, and you can’t exclude him.”
And for all of the negative responses, there were sweet interactions too, like the parents who told him, “My kid loves you. Can we get a photo with just you?’
That felt like a breakthrough.
Then there was the night a father came up to Brown and told him “Hey, I just want to let you know, you made my kid so happy tonight.”
Brown ended up signing the little boy’s jersey.
“That was like the biggest core memory that I will always have,” he said.
And Brown is grateful he had the opportunity to dance for the Hawks. He said his experience in Atlanta has changed him for the better. “Atlanta shaped me, it just made me more confident in who I am, and it made me more fearless.”
It’s a shift from the shy man Johnson remembers first meeting.
During Brown’s recently concluded final season with the Hawks there was a young man who auditioned for the dance team, Johnson said, “a similar vibe as Calvin, very, very talented.”
She remembers him saying that he felt like he had a fair shot, because Calvin Brown was on the team.