The mothers of our community

On a cold and wintery day here in Southern Illinois, feeling a bit run down after a long week full of activities and chores, I simply felt as if I could not get off the couch. My body felt like mushy mashed potatoes as I laid there and stared at the ceiling above, thinking about the randomness of the world and any little odd fact that my brain could scrounge for during such an empty space of my time.

My intrusive voice said to me in a very pointed tone “guuuuuurl, get up queen.” I giggled quietly to myself like a mad person and began to think of my speech pattern. As a homosexual male, I speak a little bit off, and I have zero intentions in changing it. Instead of the word “yes,” most of the time I say “slay,” or sometimes I jumble up random little tidbits of sayings and blurt them as if they make sense to the general public.

I have been speaking this way as long as I can remember, but I know where and when in my life there was a very big influence of this vernacular in my life, and it would be when I was around 12 years old. I had just come out of the closet, my newest obsession was all things fashion, drag and the gay community of the time. Of course, that was when everyone was wearing 3-D glasses frames to school as a statement, and there was still controversy as to if gay people should even marry, but besides all that, I was definitely realizing what community was most becoming of me.

Little Aaron was consuming any piece of media I could that felt as if it represented me and who I was born as. Although I felt loved and supported by my friends and family, there was still this sense of disconnection as mostly everyone in my life was straight or straight passing, and I was not. I basically cut my baby teeth watching Ru Paul on Logo and put myself to bed at night listening to the lovingly supportive gay sermons of Tammy Faye Bakker. I was constantly searching for something that looked and sounded “normal” to me.

The 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning, opened my eyes to a world that felt right. Directed by Jennie Livingston and filmed during the height of the AIDS epidemic, this documentary shows times of trouble and love for people amongst the LGBTQ+ community. Set up in a campy yet informative way, this program aims to educate those who have never been amongst the community and to represent those who are. The entire documentary revolves around a very specific subculture in New York known as ballroom culture and the different ways it has influenced fashion, modeling, dancing and performance all together.

To say that my younger self was obsessed is an understatement. Now that I have watched it multiple times as an adult, I think to myself how my youthful eyes probably shouldn’t have been consuming such media, but I truly do believe that I am better off now for it than not. My eager mind was thirsty for knowledge on my own community and was finally being quenched by something that didn’t feel sugar-coated or marketed specifically to catch the eye of any queer that happens to see it.

There is a certain grit to this documentary, a bit of beauty and filth. It peeks into the lives of queer individuals living freely at a time when it wasn’t always as safe to do so and doing their prep work for the balls that they will be competing in. The film focuses on many different individuals, most of which are house mothers. A “house” is a group of people who perform in balls together, but it is stated in the film that they are really like chosen families, providing love to each other that the harsh world wouldn’t.

Ballroom culture was started by Black Americans and is rooted in the beginnings of drag. Transgender women of color who performed in shows, allowing drag and performance art to become a form of entertainment, not for straight people so much as other queer individuals. Drag and female impersonation has been around since the beginning of time, but it was either kept underground for queer communities or used in shows and media as laughable entertainment.

In the 1960s, Drag became less of a vaudeville style act and stepped into the world of pageants and cabaret acts. Dorian Corey, an older house mother featured in the film, speaks on the change of times and how things evolve. Through the 1970s, the ballroom circuit was starting to find its footing to produce what came of it during the 1980s.

The dance style called “Vogue” became relevant amongst ballroom culture during the 1980s and transformed the balls from being a form of pageantry, to a being of its own. Named after the magazine, the dance features strange and awkward positions inspired by the poses you would see by glancing at the cover or flipping through the hallowed pages of a Vogue magazine. The goal of the dance is to make your body appear rigid, yet fluid while moving around. There is inspiration pulling from high fashion and even Egyptian art and hieroglyphics.

Although Voguing and ballroom culture is inspired by fashion, a lot of fashion post 1990 had a lot of ties to ballroom culture and was pulled from popular themes or categories in balls at the time. The song “Vogue” by Madonna was an homage to the ballroom community and their specific style of dancing. Voguing is still prevalent today and is still a prominently safe space created by Black and Latinx queer individuals for queer individuals.

In recent years with the HBO program “Pose” has become a favorite of the LGBTQ+ community, depicting ballroom culture at the same time that “Paris is Burning” was filmed. The show features multiple characters struggling with their everyday lives surviving with HIV or AIDS, and Transgender black women paving the way for the community. This very much helped push ballroom culture back into the mainstream media as it is today.

With February being Black History Month, we should remember all of the Black queer individuals who created and inspired many things to this day. We should attribute queer jargon and aesthetics to the trans mothers who created them and allowed others to catch on. The LGBTQ+ community wouldn’t be free if we didn’t have these trailblazers paving the way before us. We wouldn’t have RuPaul’s drag race, pride parades and many other things that could just be chalked off as gay without these women and men standing their ground for a community that they built, and we should be utterly grateful to them.

So on my cold wintery day where I shadily told myself to get up, I instead clicked on my television, got all snuggled up and re-watched Paris is Burning for the umpteenth time. I nourished my soul and thought about how grateful I am to the women who paved the way for me to do anything, even to have the privilege to write about it. To all the trans and queer Black and Latinx mothers who set not only me, but a whole community on the right path, I thank you.