“You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying in sweat.”
— Lydia Grant (Debbie Allen), FAME
Xavier Logan, 18, wasn’t even an idea in his parent's mind when the legendary Debbie Allen as Lydia Grant said the famous line to a studio of hungry dancers in the beloved 80s dance series “FAME.” But for nearly a decade, Logan, an Atlanta native and recent North Springs Charter High School of the Arts & Sciences graduate has arrived at this moment through nothing less than sweat and determination, and it all appears to be paying off.
Logan will be one of 24 dance students out of thousands of applicants entering The Juilliard School’s fall class, a dream he spoke into existence in the eighth grade, years before he graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA, or was accepted into 13 universities, or awarded 1.4 million in scholarships, and before he could name the thing that made him different from the other boys in his class. Besides navigating the stigma associated with being a Black male dancer in the South, Logan was also managing familial expectations regarding his sexuality.
“There was a lot of resistance from my family in the beginning,” says Logan. “There were a lot of people that were on the fence about letting me pursue dance. They thought that if I was a Black male dancer, then I automatically was gay.”
Although he knew he was different, Logan says he didn’t always have the language to describe his feelings, and dance provided an opportunity for him to “express different emotions without saying it publicly.” Until he did.
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