10’s Across the Board: An Overview of Ballroom Culture
10! 10! 10’s across the board!
Hello, everyone! I hope everyone is having better weather than what I’ve been experiencing this week. We have had so much rain in Raleigh, I’m starting to assemble animals two by two for my ark. I want to continue our exploration of the often overlooked world of African-American queer culture. It’s vibrant, rich, and incredibly layered. One part of African-American queer culture that fascinates me focuses on dance, serving looks, and giving community and family when people so desperately need and crave it. I’m talking about the ballroom scene.
When you hear the word ballroom, you may think of wedding receptions. But when I mention having a “ball” in this context, it’s strictly a competition. Contestants “walk”, or compete, against each other in a variety of categories. Parts of the competitions may include dancing, fashion, and modeling. Contestants compete in a variety of categories. They often try to give the best looks or dance moves for a panel of judges. They often include categories like: Butch Queen Realness (ability to blend in with male heterosexuals), Runway (Judged on participants’ ability to walk like a supermodel), and Vogue Performance (Using the vogue elements of hands, catwalk, duckwalk, floor performance, spins and dips). Performers compete in Houses, which are groups of people that form strong familial bonds with each other around performing at these balls. These houses are oftentimes the only family these performers have, as they are often kicked out of their families just because of who they are.
Ball culture started nearly 100 years ago in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. It started as a way for queer persons of color, primarily African-American and Latino persons, to bond and form community. It also acted as a way for queer persons to openly defy laws that forbade people to dress in opposite gender clothing. These balls have become a safe haven for transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming persons of color to express who they are. They have been a saving grace for countless amounts of people.
The drag ball culture mostly stayed underground until the early 90’s. In 1990, Madonna released one of her most popular songs, “Vogue”. Vogue is a style dance created in 1970’s Harlem. However, not many people outside of the drag ball culture had heard of it. In fact, in her music video, Madonna features several famous NYC ball performers vogue dancing. However, the next year, the documentary “Paris Is Burning” released at the Sundance Film Festival, and it opened the world’s eyes to the underground ball scene.
The documentary, in a word, is fascinating. I watched it two years ago during Pride month, and I was stunned at how diverse the culture is. The documentary focuses on the Harlem ball culture during the late 1980’s. It highlights people struggling with homelessness, discrimination, and finding chosen families when their birth families reject them. It also mentions several phrases and concepts that are now part of the larger LGBTQ culture and have seeped into general pop culture as well. Terms like “werk”, “throwing shade”, and “Yaaaas!” were birthed out of the drag ball room scene.
Now ballroom culture has re-entered the pop culture atmosphere in the last couple of years ago. The hit TV show, “Pose”, offers a fictional view of the ballroom culture around the time that “Paris is Burning” was filmed. In the show, house names like Evangelista and Abundance are in place of real houses like Labeija and Xtravaganza, which are featured in “Paris is Burning”. It has been nominated for multiple awards, and helped Billy Porter win an Emmy for Best Actor in a Drama. It’s also an amazing show, and features a primarily transgender cast. It is must-see TV. Finally, HBO Max, the network’s subscription-based streaming service, is releasing “Legendary”, a reality-competition show in which ten houses compete for a cash prize based on themed balls every week.
The LGBTQ community owes a great deal to the ballroom community. A lot of cultural vernacular and traditions stem from this vibrant scene. It’s also a scene that is completely out of the world that I live in. I like that though. I like that all of the world doesn’t look like me, live like me, or practice their faith like me. It allows me to see what queerness, and also Christianity can look like. I hope you take the time to watch both “Paris is Burning” and “Pose”, which are both on Netflix right now! Come back next week as we take another deep dive into African American queer culture.
