#ballroom culture

[vaspider]

Important takeaways include:

Nobody actually knows the origin of butch.

Butches were harassed out of visibility by some of the early lesbian orgs.

'Butch' first became widespread in working-class lesbian bars.

Butch has, however, always been a term used by gay men, lesbians, and trans people. It has never been a 'lesbian-only' term.

Prior to the emergence of butch, other terms included Daddy, Husband, and Top Sgt. (which frankly I kinda wanna bring back)

This is a really good primer on butch as a term & despite queer history being a literal special interest of mine, I learned things! Take a few minutes and watch it.

[gr00vyvampiregrrrl]

Vogue Nights, Friday the 13th edition from back in October 2023

[petervintonjr]

Today we celebrate the life and accomplishments of the "Godfather of Voguing," Willi Ninja. Born in 1961 Queens, New York, Willi was raised by an encouraging and supportive mother, Esther Leake, who not only encouraged his passion for dance but --significantly-- supported his own self-identity. While not able to afford dance lessons, Leake nevertheless took her son to ballet shows and other performances at places like the Apollo Theater, and Willi embarked on a self-taught path to dance greatness.

Borrowing heavily from the Harlem ballroom scene (and its established role as a socially safe space for Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ alike), Willi mastering the singular art of voguing, a unique form of dance that blended fashion poses with precise martial-arts movements. In 1982 Willi founded his own dance troupe, the House Of Ninja, which --in keeping with Harlem ballroom tradition-- also served as a community safety net. The "Ninja" moniker was inspired by Willi's own interest and study of various martial arts. Willi rapidly ascended to stardom, perfecting and reinventing his dance techniques. By the 1990's Willi had landed appearances in music videos (including two with Janet Jackson), films, talk shows, and international runway shows; drawing attention from pop icons like Madonna and fashion moguls like Jean-Paul Gaultier. One 1991 appearance on Joan Rivers' show caused considerable buzz as he encouraged audience members to "walk" as if participating at a drag ball.

On this very date (June 9) in 1990, Jennie Livingston's inspiring documentary Paris is Burning, which features appearances by Willi and the House of Ninja, was released at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival. The film exposed Willi and his signature choreography to a much wider audience. Shortly after the film's premiere, Willi starred in Anthem, a critically-acclaimed 9-minute video directed by Marlon Troy Riggs.

Willi never neglected his own community, though --his rising stardom offered him a megaphone to advocate for many issues important to the LGBTQ+ community, among them HIV/AIDS awareness and fighting to end the relentless social stigma that accompanied patients with the disease. Willi himself died of heart failure due AIDS complications, in 2006.

[vibe-stash]

Paris Is Burning (1990)

Director: Jennie Livingston Cinematography: Paul Gibson

[k-wame]

aight bigups for the choice

[pradashaya]

BALLROOM QUEENS

[commiepinkofag]

Marking Pride month in any way here is an act of defiance. The organisers of the Fola Francis Ball – named in honour of a transgender woman who died last year - only released the venue details with just hours to go before it opened. But this did not deter the more than 500 people who turned up in a district close to the thriving waterfront area of Nigeria’s commercial heartland, Lagos. Around the gated venue were abandoned car parts and warehouses known for rave parties. A thumping bassline could be heard through the door and crossing the threshold felt like stepping into an alternative reality. Inside was Lagos’s queer community, the venue, a cloak shielding them from the world outside.

[troutreznor]

Carrie Being Made Up for the Ball, 1984.

photo & caption by Mariette Pathy Allen [website] [instagram]

[noperopesaredope]

80s American drag ball culture is so fascinating and cool to me from a social and historical standpoint. A while back, I watched this documentary called Paris is Burning which was released in 1990, and I am low key obsessed with it. Like, all these people were rejected by their families and society, and they often had no place to go or no one to support them. So they all ended up banding together to create chosen families. And due to general society's lack of acceptance of their forms of self expression, they decided to create a safespace that allowed them to reject these particular social norms and be themselves. This eventually evolved into a complex culture with traditions and styles of dress and language and social interactions and stuff. It's really beautiful, in a way. I have recently started getting into anthropology since it became one of my require courses, and ballroom culture is a goldmine to me.

I've actually started using it as inspiration for the world of one of my stories. It's just so real and alive and interesting, and it should be appreciated more.

[bantuotaku]

Mekhi Cuffee: "A 1 night special. LIKE A FEM QUEEN. It’s the little things. Get in. #vogue"

Source

[chromeaangel]

FEM QWEEN FACE AT THE 1993 HOUSE OF MONTANA BALL

[campgender]

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley on Indya Moore’s Calvin Klein ads, ballroom hands as gender performance, & imagining + valorizing femme penis

image description: four cropped screenshots of text from The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley.

excerpt 1:

In their “I Speak My Truth in #MyCalvins” spot, Moore gives viewers hands performance while perched gracefully on the balcony’s edge. The ball of their left foot balanced on the ledge, right leg extended to the floor, and thighs in an open V, their right hand holds the railing while the left circles on the soft, limp wrist characteristic of vogue femme. At this moment—also the beginning of the voiceover that “speaks truth”—Moore seems at once grounded and ready to fly, their crotch bulge, breasts, and ballroom hands gesturing toward femme flight.

In the companion video “Convention Killer,” Moore—now advertising a black lace bodysuit from Calvin’s “womenswear” line—again gives us hands performance along with floor work, rolling and twisting with arched back and circling wrists as they dance in a mirrored glass cage. A black shirt tied around their waist swings between their legs as they work vogue performance style “soft and cunt,” which “consists of clean, soft, and smooth hand/arm movements in a fluid and flowing way.”

Mobile hands, not pendulous flesh of any kind, are the body parts that tell stories of gender in vogue femme, Tente argues: “The hands mark every presence and activate all bodies, from the voguers to those who came to look or judge... They frame the face, create boxes and flows of energy, they tut, twist and draw eights, they tell a story, point to certain parts of the body that need to be looked at and admired.”

excerpt 2 (images 2 & 3):

Moore’s styling and posing in the Calvin Klein videos use hands performance to point to ways Moore alters not only the body itself but their understanding of what their body means. In the “Convention Killer” spot, their hands deftly circle both their face and upper thighs as “parts of the body that need to be looked at and admired.”

Their vogue femme hands point to their crotch in a way that, in the words of my brilliant Femme Theory student Elijah Ezeji-Okoye, “begs us to imagine a biologically femme, non-binary penis”: that is, Moore’s voguing femme choreography in their slightly bulging Calvins “allows us to include the biology of the penis in a more representative femme-ininity while resisting the gender binaries that are imposed upon us from birth.”

I love Ezeji-Okoye’s idea that Moore dresses and dances a biologically femme penis, which aligns with Moore’s self-identification as “nonbinary, femme,” and decidedly not female. I also love that when I write something like this—Moore gestures toward her biologically femme penis with soft and cunt hands—I’m putting together words that make little sense in relation to each other in straight common sense but signify generously in Black queer world making.

Like Black pussy in Shoniqua Roach’s theorizing, cunt and cunty don’t reference genitalia in ballroom. Cunt and pussy are “criteria for gender performance in ballroom culture, as opposed to insults or demeaning expletives hurled at women and femme queens,” Bailey points out. (Comedian D. L. Hughley once called Moore a pussy for objecting to his homophobic jokes, to which they responded, “Pussy’s are warm, have depth and are strong enough to take a beating... Pussy is absolutely complimentary to who I am.”) Bailey notes, “When these terms are used, the speaker does not typically say ‘you are a cunt.’ Instead, the speaker says, ‘give me pussy’ or ‘you look cunt,’ meaning give me femininity in your performance and self-presentation.”

In Bailey’s examples, cunt functions as an adjective rather than a noun: and while concrete nouns suggest “permanency, stability, fixity,” as Gloria Wekker writes of Dutch nouns describing sexuality, adjectives—whose semantic role is change, modification of a noun’s meaning—are more supple, more suited to the malleable, unfinished understanding of sex and gender Bailey attributes to ballroom.

Cunty is a descriptor Moore themself uses, as in their tweet about Janet Mock’s work on Pose: “Goddess @janetmock teleported from the universe of infinitely cunty magical stuff and crushed some sugar, some spice and everything transsexual & softly blew the con- tents with her hand using her holy afro futuristic breath unto the book of Pose. & then our cast was born.” Nobody’s cookie-cutter, heteronormative femininity, the infinite cuntiness in Moore’s fabulous description is a femme-ininity that multiplies gender possibilities like grains of sugar, births something new with hands and mouth instead of uterus, and creates beautiful Black femme futures that were never supposed to exist.

excerpt 3:

In a roundtable on colorism, Moore cites white woman cunt—“a phrase in the ballroom scene that is commending somebody that is beautiful”—as proof that decolonization of queer bodies is ongoing, painful, and powerful even in our own spaces. Black femme cunt, Black femme penis as standards of excellence, they know, are “holy afro futuristic” dreams yet to be realized.

end image description.

[gr00vyvampiregrrrl]

Club Shugga at Boondocks

[itsskay]

Songs to slow dance to >>>>>

[bruce-morrow]

In memory and in celebration of the life of O'Shae Sibley, Brooklyn, NY, August 4, 2023

Video: Bruce Morrow

[k-wame]

LIL UZI VERT VOGUING at COACHELLA '24 🎥via tiktok (cakesscam)