Now, Drew spends several hours a daydancing and at least an hourtraining. He goes to a dance school in Cincinnati, a two-hour drive from his home in Greenville. His focus is so strong that he once danced an entire competition with seven broken toes.

In the dance world, his unusual background was a plus. People remembered him. In 2008, competitors and friends started comparing him to Barack Obama, a parallel that still makes him hop up and down and clap his hands. (The fact that he will never be old enough to vote for Mr. Obama for president is one of his biggest disappointments, he said.)

“It’s that black kid from America in the pink shirt,” Drew Lovejoy said, repeating what people say about him.

But it has served him less well here in his hometown, where a rural stretch of road bisects sweeping pastures dotted with aging barns. He moved here when he was 9, after his mother married Donald Goldberg, a Greenville resident she met at a nearby synagogue. (She had parted with Drew’s biological father, Terrance Lovejoy, when Drew was still a baby, though she remains on good terms with him, and says he sometimes rides to Drew’s competitions with her husband.)

It was not easy. Drew was a dancer, unusual for boys here, and black in a mostly white town. Bullying eventually prompted his mother to pull him out of school and start him in an online education program. He is still there today.

Image Credit... The New York Times

While most townspeople accept him, with some going out of their way to make him feel comfortable, Drew said he still does not feel entirely at ease. He does not walk the dog after dark.