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Six-foot-one dancer and this month's cover model JONAH WILKINS heats up Sin City with Vegas sin-sation Jubilee!
When Instinct cover model Jonah Wilkins was 13 years old—like most kids his age—he awoke at first light on Christmas morning and excitedly dragged his mother and older brother from their cozy beds to the family room to unwrap the gifts that awaited them. At the foot of the brightly lit Christmas tree, Jonah voraciously tore into one gift after another until he came across one rectangular present, about the size of a shoe box. Could it be?—he wondered. He had been dropping hints for months that he wanted to start tap dance lessons. Had his mother heard his pleas? With each rip of holiday paper, young Jonah could see more and more of the mystery box’s contents. Finally, there they were: a brand-new pair of Capezio tap shoes.
"I was so excited that I forgot about all my other toys, put the shoes on as fast as I could, ran to the nearest loud floor and proceeded to do what I thought might be tap,” remembers Jonah, now 25 years old.
The young hoofer dancing feverishly with those new tap shoes could have had no way of knowing that this one Christmas gift would eventually lead him from his Detroit neighborhood to the bright lights of Sin City. After all, tap was just the latest interest for the young man who, by 13, had already learned to play the piano, violin, clarinet, trombone, trumpet and saxophone, had sung with the choir and had played baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis and golf. “I had a very fortunate childhood in that I wasn’t forced to do anything I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, you play violin, so let’s just stick with that.’ It was more, ‘Okay, you’re done with that. Let’s move on,’ until I found out what made me happy,” Jonah recalls.
And dancing did make him happy. Shortly after Christmas, Jonah started those sought-after tap lessons—which eventually led to ballet lessons, which led to jazz lessons, which led to modern dance lessons. Just a few years later, an opportunity came for the teen to show all that he had learned in dance class at his very first audition, for a spot on Shockwave, the dance team for Detroit’s WNBA team. “One of my mom’s friends knew that the WNBA [dance team] used teenagers, so she said to my mom, ‘He’s a dancer; he should audition,’ and my mom said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ And so I did the audition and got in.” While the rest of Jonah’s classmates were watching the game on TV, he was there at the Palace of Auburn Hills, dancing on the basketball court at halftime and getting his first taste of life in front of an audience. “It was such a rush performing in front of all those people,” he says. Article continues below... 
In between shows, Jonah studied his craft further at the Detroit High School of Arts—think High School Musical—where he spent his freshman and sophomore years of high school. “On the first day of high school, I came out. I knew who I was, and, of course, it was performing arts high school, so on the first day we were all sitting around going, ‘Okay, who’s gay?’” he chuckles. Even if it was performing arts high school, he did take his share of flak for being gay from, of all people, the brass section of the band. “They always had smart remarks. It didn’t really bother us, though, because we were gay, black and in Detroit, so we gave it right back to them,” he says with sass.
Coming out to his mother, whom he describes as his number one fan, was almost as easy as coming out at a performing arts high school. “When I was younger, my big-brother kind of person, who was also my dance teacher at the time, took me in because my older brother had already gone away to college. So when dance class was over, he’d take me to a movie or whatever. He volunteered at a place for troubled black gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender kids. One day he asked me to come talk to the younger kids because I was so ‘This is me; deal with it.’ And so I said, ‘Mom, Danny asked me to be a youth counselor at this place for troubled black gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth,’ and she said, ‘Oh, well, are you [a] young, troubled black gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not troubled,’” Jonah says, with a hearty laugh.
Want more? Get the inside story on Jonah in the October 09 issue of Instinct Magazine!
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