OFF THE SHELF
Recommended Films, Fine Reads and Dot-coms
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And the Category Is … Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community Bernie Brooks, collections specialist at The Henry Ford, suggests a read of And the Category Is … Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community by Ricky Tucker to introduce yourself to the fascinating world of ballroom culture. Though ballroom culture has long been an underground staple of America’s Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ community, the mainstream has been flirting with its colorful drag queens and competing houses on and off for decades. Madonna’s smash song Vogue co-opted ballroom’s most well-known category, voguing, in 1990. RuPaul was the first drag queen to score a hit single on the Hot 100 in 1993, and his RuPaul’s Drag Race has been drawing viewers since 2009. Lately, though, it seems that ballroom and its radical, liberatory modes of self-expression have reached something of a pop-cultural tipping point with FX’s drama Pose and HBO’s voguing competition Legendary. Those seeking a deeper understanding of ballroom needn’t look any further than Ricky Tucker’s And the Category Is … Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community. Tucker alternates between interviews and an almost novelistic approach to historical narrative to explore the movement’s language, fashion, music, houses and key characters. Highly readable and hugely entertaining, Tucker goes deep. Anyone even remotely interested in the spheres of contemporary art and culture that have drawn on ballroom — and that’s basically all of them — will be glad they sought out Tucker’s research. DID YOU KNOW? /
In 1990, documentarian Jennie Livingston released Paris Is Burning, which chronicles the ballroom culture of New York City and the African American, Latinx, gay and transgender communities involved in it.
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JUNE-DECEMBER 2022
