The grinding guys from the halftime show have been identified & they’ve got the best response to homophobic haters
"I think that queerness deserves to be seen and heard and normalized," shares one of the dancers from the viral Super Bowl moment.
Mark
Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s triumphant Super Bowl Halftime Show—or, Benito Bowl, as we’re now affectionately calling it—sure was a conversation starter, to say the very least.
And while the MAGA set has found no shortage of non-issues to b*tch about, our gay corner of the internet has really only been concerned about one thing (well, aside from the fact that Lady Gaga & Bad Bunny would be great in an Evita remake, and that Ricky Martin & Kid Rock are somehow the same age), asking one question over & over again.
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And that question is: What’s their @?
They’re of course referring to the to male dancers who, relatively early on in the show, can briefly be seen grinding up on each other against the truck that Bad Bunny performs his reggaeton hit “EoO” on top of.
But we know you know the moment, because it’s been GIF’d and meme’d all over our social media feeds since Sunday. And yet, despite its virality, no one seemed to be able to tell us what we really wanted to know: whoa re these guys???
Well, thanks to some expert reporting from Them‘s Mathew Rodriguez, the pair have finally been identified. They are dancers Dan Santiago (a.k.a. left grinder) and Igor Faria (right grinder).
And now, to answer your follow-up question: They’re straight. Sorry to break it to you.
The good news is that sounds like both of them are total allies, and are not taking their roles as proxy representatives for the queer community on one of the biggest stages in the world lightly.
“I think it’s important for men to see [men] dancing like that,” Santiago shared with Them, admitting to some initial hesitancy over the grinding moment see he identifies as heterosexual himself. “It’s not that deep, right? Like we were just doing our job. And at the same time, it is that deep for us because we are doing the performance, being so comfortable in our masculinity that it wasn’t hard.”
“I think that queerness deserves to be seen and heard and normalized,” he adds. “It’s important for the world to see that masculinity doesn’t need to be toxic, and it doesn’t need to look a certain way.” Amen to that!
But speaking of toxic masculinity, earlier this week, Republican Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee requested a formal investigation into NBC and NBCUniversal after the Halftime Show, calling it a “disgrace” and a “mockery of American families.”
Specifically, he seemed to take issue with the blink-and-you’d-miss it moment between Santiago and Faria, labeling the performance “gay p*rnography” and claiming it forced children “endure explicit displays of gay sexual acts,” also decrying it was “pure smut.”
Um, dude, sounds like you were even more fixated on these guys grinding than we were?
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The homophobia of it all is loud and clear, and Santiago calls the backlash from right-wing conservatives like Ogles “absolutely ridiculous,” dismissing the Congressman’s call for a formal investigation as just another example of men doing absolutely anything to “protect masculinity at all costs.”
Having been a professional dancer for the past eight years, it’s no surprise that Santiago’s worked alongside & become friends with plenty of queer people (a quick look at his Instagram tells us he’s performed with the likes of Omar Apollo & Katseye, while Faria counts icons Sabrina Carpenter & Ariana Grande among his collaborators), so it’s cool to see him stand up and speak up for the community.
“I do hold [the performance] with a lot of pride because a lot of my friends are queer and I take being an ally seriously,” he shares. “There’s a lot of homophobia in the world. So being an ally feels really important right now with the hate that is just spewing in the world.”
And as a New York-born Puerto Rican, he’s especially proud to work for an artist like Bad Bunny and what he means for the Latin community, sharing a hopeful message of love & inclusivity when our country needs it most.
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And can we talk about the two men grinding?
So, Dan Santiago and Igor Faria, thank you for your service—and by that we mean: grinding on each other. And thank you for being such great examples of straight men who stand up for their queer siblings. We’re lucky to have you as allies.
Now, what we assume you’d been waiting for, here are there @s, along with some of their best Instagram pics:
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You get what you deserve!
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