Category Is: Ballroom & Its Enduring Influence
*Article from Lexington Line Spring/Summer 2024 Issue, pages 14-16
Check out the full issue here
You have heard Madonna’s song “Vogue,” but where does voguing come from? What about “walking that f*****g duck” like Anetra on RuPaul’s Drag Race?
“The ballroom has always been a place for everybody,” says Legendary Daebrian Balenciaga, father and founder of the West Coast branch of the House of Balenciaga. “And not everybody fits the mold of the perfect, attractive, typical gay man or lesbian woman—the ballroom accepts all of those people”.
Daebrian is referring to the ballroom scene, an influential and exuberant subculture that originated in interracial drag balls as early as the 1890s, according to John Hopkins University. Balls are extravagant competitions where various drag “houses” come together and compete in a series of runway and dance competitions.
Despite its enormous cultural footprint, ballroom itself has historically escaped the mainstream gaze—the general public tends to be influenced by people who they don’t know were influenced by it.
But Drag Race, Pose, Legendary, and even the seminal 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, which is gaining new audiences, have started to change that. The benefit of seeing ballroom culture in the media is that its message is aspirational for young people: you can be anything you want in life.
The problem, though, is mainstream appreciation of ballroom is often quite shallow and not without elements of appropriation, according to Daebrian.
He is suspicious, for example, of the ways ballroom language is adopted by people who have no real context about its origins.
“We had our own lingo, and it was ours,” he says about now-mainstream phrases like “ate that,” “slay,” “you turned it,” and “it’s giving.”
When the mainstream adopts ballroom phrases and styles, it does so without a lot of understanding about their rich and nuanced backgrounds.
A drag house, for example, is not a brick-and-mortar space, but more of a unit created to provide community, safety, and support for those who participate in balls. A house starts with a “mother” or “father,” usually someone already familiar with the scene. From there, mothers take in “legendary children,'' who are up and coming on the scene. From there, a family begins, creating a house.
“My kids are like my children,” says Kelly Gorgeous Gucci, legendary mother and founder of the House of Gorgeous Gucci. “I love them, I nurture them… I don't want my kids to just be something on the ballroom floor. I want them to be something off the floor as well.”
In addition to showing off their fashions, queens, and kings of the ballroom scene will perform dances and vogue. “Voguing” is the art of dancing and using your hands to tell a story. There are five voguing categories: duck walk, catwalk, hands, floor work, and spins and dips.
Plenty of these details have leaked to the mainstream by way of Drag Race, but ballroom culture has influenced music, fashion, and film for much longer. Its popularity is growing, but in a way that can seem superficial.
Kelly also has concerns about ballroom culture going mainstream—in particular, the involvement of corporations. When she first started, prizes were simply trophies or mini-grants of $250—“the most grand prize that had ever been in ballroom in my years was $1,000,” she says.
“Now in ballroom, we have $20,000 and $30,000 categories and all types of things of that nature,” she laments. “And it's really taken the fun out of ballroom because you have so many people that are in this competitive arena and want to win when it [used to be] about just having fun and being a family.”
She argues that “we just need to get back into what ballroom was actually about—getting a trophy and just being happy.”
Another major concern for her is the exploitation of young artists who get little recognition.
“When it comes to all these shows being made and centered around ballroom, they want to come in and they want to get the ratings,” she says. “But they're not actually giving the kids what their talent is worth. The industry is making millions, and these kids are making pennies.”
There are those who trace ballroom’s mainstream ubiquity back to its source, but Daebrian says he still misses when it was more fully underground.
“I loved that the people in the crowd were ballroom walkers,” he says. “Now when you go to balls, a lot of times, people are in the crowd or spectators are fans of the culture.”
Nevertheless, both believe ballroom remains critically important in part because its runways show how gender itself is just a performance; many contestants dress as the opposite sex by donning heavy makeup, styled hair and wigs, and extravagant clothes. Queens use runway “categories” to present fashion that fits certain criteria such as butch queen, femme queen, and many others.
Its history is significant, too, for the safe spaces it has created. The LGBTQ+ and P.O.C. communities would turn to this subculture as an escape. Despite being a very competitive culture, ballroom has helped many to embrace themselves and find self-love.
“Ballroom is going to tear you down before it picks you up,” Kelly Gorgeous Gucci says. “But once it picks you up, you're going to have the confidence that you can do whatever you want.”
Daebrian echoes this sentiment.
“It has created so much growth for me mentally,” he says. “I am a better leader at work because I'm a house father, and I have to manage kids with all types of issues.”
He adds that ballroom has also given him confidence as a Black gay man.
“I've evolved so much as a person and [gotten] so comfortable in my skin,” he says.
Ballroom culture is still alive and thriving, with New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, and San Francisco boasting some of its biggest communities. It’s even gone international.
“Ballroom is just not in the states anymore,” Kelly states—so even if some of the appreciation is appropriation, the hope is that more and more safe spaces will emerge around the world. “Paris, London, France, Australia, China, Japan. It's all over.”