Dirty Dancing

"My first lesson was a pretty good lesson, mainly because he just complimented me for every step I took and he was just so delighted with my progress that he was kissing me every time," Lucy remembers. "And after a while, I told him, 'Quit kissing me or I'll start charging for it.' I was joking. My confidence level got really high; he was telling me what a great natural dancer I was. But also on the second lesson, I remember very vividly that the door opened, and his girlfriend came in and he was very nervous about it." But Lucy didn't mind Gaia being there, because she gave some valuable pointers.

Gaia wasn't around when Lucy arrived at the Tango House for her third lesson. And as she walked in, she saw a naked Gale dash across the hall from his living quarters. "If he had underwear, they must've been extremely small, because I don't remember seeing anything," she says.

She thought maybe Gale had just overslept — but she also thought it odd that he showed up for the lesson in pajama pants. And not only did he keep urging her to relax her private parts, but he seemed to be touching his own private parts too much, "like Michael Jackson."

"It got so uncomfortable that I just left," Lucy says. "I didn't tell him why. I told him I wasn't feeling right, that I had a headache, and I left. I was very disappointed. I thought, if this is what the tango teacher is going to talk about, I wasn't going to take the class."

Lucy had paid for four lessons, but she never went back after the third.

This wasn't Lucy's first unpleasant sexual experience. When she was a girl, a custodian at her elementary school put his hand up her skirt. She told her mother, who told school administrators. It turned out there were many other victims, but Lucy was one of the few willing to testify. The perpetrator was sentenced to seven years in prison. But his family was popular in her home town, and Lucy felt the heat.

"From that moment," she remembers, "I was victimized. A lot of people pointed fingers at me and called me troublemaker. Probably because of that, I wasn't going to speak up this time." So she, like Martha and Angela, stayed quiet.

But last year, word of Gale's unusual tango-instruction techniques started leaking out of the community — and into the files of the Denver Police Department and the Denver District Attorney's Office. Those files started with an incident in June 2006, when a woman went to the Tango House for a lesson and found Gale in a weird outfit that allowed his genitals to be outlined. As the two twirled around the dance floor, Gale encouraged the woman to "free herself" from any self-conscious feelings. She glanced over at Gale, and saw that he had exposed his buttocks, testicles and erect penis, the woman told police. She was so uncomfortable that she fled the dance floor for the kitchen, where she got a glass of water. Gale followed her, and told her that other women with low self-esteem issues got over them quickly when they freed themselves as he had. After Gale pleaded with her not to talk about what he had done, she agreed to one more dance.

In this final dance, Gale put his hand between the woman's legs, cupping her genital area through her clothing, and told her to imagine peeing in his hand, according to police reports. He asked her to keep this between the two of them, too, and she agreed.

After the lesson was over, the woman called the DPD.

Gale was apologetic when a Denver police detective contacted him, and admitted that he'd exposed himself during the lesson. He said that while he didn't recall touching the woman's genitals, the "peeing" line was one of his teaching techniques.

Gale was charged with indecent exposure and unlawful public indecency. On April 3, he pleaded guilty to the indecent-exposure charge in exchange for the public-indecency charge being dismissed.

Suddenly the tango community's big secret was no longer a secret.

And more secrets were about to spill. On April 17, Gale was charged with unlawful sexual contact in connection with his behavior with another student. In February, the woman had gone to the Denver Police Department with complaints that Gale had fondled her breasts at the first lesson, then placed his hand between her legs and groped her on a second. There was no third lesson.

Gale pleaded not guilty. He has a trial set in October on that charge; if he is convicted, he faces up to two years in jail and a $5,000 fine, and his name will also be added to the state's sex-offender registry.

Gale's legal woes came up at a Tango Colorado board meeting in April. Gale, who was at the meeting, was invited to discuss his situation but declined, citing his pending criminal case and sentencing. Neither of the women who'd filed charges against him, both relative newcomers to tango, were in attendance.