Marina S. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Kansas–

“I remember my dad used to say, ‘You have three strikes against you in this world. Every black man has two, that they’re just black and they’re a male. But you’re black and you’re male and you’re gay. You’re gonna have a hard fuckin’ time. If you are going to do this, you are going to have to be stronger than you ever imagined.”

These are the first words we hear in Jennie Livingstone’s iconic 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” and they cannot help but permeate every moment of the film. Filmed between the years 1987–1989, Paris Is Burning is an intimate and unblinking chronicle of New York City’s Ball Scene, an underground subculture formed by Black and Latino gay and transgender communities. Balls, informally organized events that centered around individuals competing in events based on fashion shows or beauty pageants, were a critical part of Queer communities in major cities since at least the 1920’s. However the importance of these events only increased during the heightened periods of discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people that began in the 1950s during the Lavender Scare. 

Today Ball Culture is most commonly remembered because of slickly produced and somewhat sanitized accounts like the 2018 television series Pose, or because of its influence on contemporary drag performance. These narratives tend to focus on the elaborate and opulent attire and theatrical performance used by contestants in the Balls and often have the effect of flattening their significance for the highly marginalized communities that created them. Paris Is Burning remains the essential document of Ball Culture because while always foregrounding the joyous and life-affirming nature of these events, the film always frames them within a precarious intersection of racial and anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination, extreme poverty and the ever present spectre of the AIDS epidemic. 

“You know, a lot of those kids that are in the balls, they don’t have two of nothing. Some of them don’t even eat,” Pepper LaBeija, one of the main subjects of the film comments, “They come to balls starving. And they sleep in the under 21, or they sleep on the pier or whatever. They don’t have a home to go to. But they’ll go out and they’ll steal something and get dressed up and come to a ball for that one night and live the fantasy.”

It is this fantasy, or rather the desire of the film’s subjects to experience the material security and comfort that was so heavily advertised in 1980’s America that remains the most powerful theme of Paris Is Burning. At key moments in the documentary, Livingstone masterfully edits candid footage of the affluence of New York City’s Financial District with voice-over commentary of her interviewees as they detail their experiences with poverty, housing insecurity and employment discrimination. Most heartbreakingly are the interviews with Venus Xtravaganza, a young transgender woman who frankly recounts the violence she experiences as a sex worker in order to make ends meet after being compelled to leave home at the age of 15. Venus’ murder and the ripples it sends through the Ball Scene provide a tragic coda for Paris Is Burning.

Much more than a dispassionate or static account of a marginalized community, Paris Is Burning remains a vibrant and socially conscious document of the strength of its subjects. As LGBTQIA+ people face increased campaigns of violence and oppression under the Trump regime, this film’s depiction of the resilience of that community makes an impassioned argument for the need to dismantle the system of capitalist exploitation that makes such oppression inevitable. Paris Is Burning remains essential viewing now more than ever.

For Venus Xtravaganza
(May 5, 1965 – December 21, 1988)

Categories: LGBTQIA+, Media & Culture, Movies