The barre was low but I thrived at an inclusive beginners' ballet class for adults

"Uh oh, we've got dinosaur hands again," said Claire, the ballet teacher. I look down, and sure enough my hands, instead of graceful and light like butterflies, are curled up next to my torso like the claws of a T-rex.

Several of my classmates are sheepishly uncurling their fingers and visibly concentrating on going back into their starting positions. Others have gotten distracted and are clawing through the bags for water bottles, and another classmate asks to go to the toilet.

This kind of delightful bedlam — tutus akimbo — sounds like standard behaviour for children's ballet classes. But in this case none of us are children — I'm in my late thirties, desperately trying to do a plié in my business socks, and I'm nowhere near the oldest.

I'm at a ballet class called BalletRadical. Billed as a community ballet class that is a radically inclusive and safe space for everyone.

The class I'm doing is for absolute beginners, and I'm clearly the target market — I've never danced a step before in my life, and even though I'm absolutely terrified, I suspect I'm going to be amazing at it.

A fancy little man

I've always regretted not learning how to dance as a kid. My sister, at one point in our childhood, did them all: tap, modern, jazz and ballet, but it was ballet that I secretly coveted — the elegant costumes, the extremely dramatic music, the poise and dignity.

I enjoyed the pomp and mystery of it. I remember secretly copying the moves I'd see my sister perform during the many long concerts we'd be forced to attend.

My parents wouldn't have had a single problem with me doing ballet, and would have encouraged me without a second thought — in fact they were desperate to get me involved in activities that weren't "reading alone in a dark room".

But children pick up on gendered attitudes to ballet, even if they don't understand that something like homophobia is the motivating factor.

There was a boy in my sister's class named Thomas — and it was so very clear to me that he was considered a bit "funny" for taking part in dance classes.  He was notable, and not necessarily in a good way.

This kind of scrutiny — long before I even knew what queerness was or engaged in my own sexuality — was common. Around this time, after a bout of primary school bullying, my dad tried to teach me how to "walk less flamboyantly", due to an apparent inability to stop prancing around like a fancy little prince.

A welcoming space

Claire, who runs BalletRadical, got into ballet comparatively later in life, only beginning when they were 18 — an age that quickly exposed how exclusionary and competitive ballet dancing can be. It was this attitude that motivated them to create BalletRadical and its ethos of inclusivity.

"[Ballet is] forbidding from the outside. It's forbidding from the inside … the idea of what a ballet body looks like is very exclusionary, to many, many people," they tell me.

"I made the class to specifically be a welcoming space, that we are explicitly queer-friendly, explicitly body neutral.

"Classes are by donation as well, because ballet is also expensive and generally an upper-class-associated art form. I try to make it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible."

When I arrive at my first class, I'm given a quick introduction to basic forms by Claire, as well as an outline of what I can expect from the rest of the class.

There are about 10 people in the Melbourne studio, some younger than me, some much older, a mix of athleisure gear, tracksuit pants and actual ballet outfits.

As we're warming up, we do a ballet squat (which definitely has a fancier term I haven't learnt yet) and you can hear knees crack around the room like rifles at a soldier's funeral.

Part of my regret about not doing ballet as a kid is that I've always suspected I may be a rare instinctual dance talent, able to leap and bend and twirl immediately and gloriously.

Unfortunately, I'm quickly disabused of this notion, as I death grip the bar and kind of bob and bend stiffly, serving skyscraper in a stiff breeze more than swan dying in a lake.

The only gay ballet dancer

Claire balances their class between being fun and welcoming and actually working on concrete dance skills.

I'm still a bit nervous, but only because I'm trying something completely new and strange. Importantly, I don't feel unwelcome because of my queerness or my age or my complete — and frankly embarrassing — lack of skills.

"I think it's really interesting, talking about queerness in ballet, because often people are like, 'oh, there are heaps of gay people in dance'," Claire says when I ask them about the rigid nature of gender in ballet.

"That's an extremely limiting idea of masculinity. You're saying that you can be male in dance in a very specific way, in a feminine way."

A lot has changed since I was a kid — queerness and gender expression is more common and accepted, and people like Claire are actively trying to undo the exclusionary thinking that acts as a gatekeeper from things like ballet.

But my biggest takeaway — apart from discovering that there are muscles in my hips I've never felt before and they can hurt really badly — is that I'm no longer willing to let my sexuality or gender expression limit what I can do.

Sure, I'll never be a beautiful, soaring, poised ballet dancer, but I may learn how to do a soft elegant hand and have some fun.