Dir. Jennie Livingston
"I went to a ball, I got a trophy, and now everybody wants to know me."What is the purpose of a category? To differentiate one thing from another; to recognise similar things; to know a thing? Does a thing have to be categorised, or can it simply be?
In the balls of Paris is Burning, the contestants compete in contests of dressing in drag. Categories include 'Luscious Body', 'Schoolboy/Schoolgirl Realness', 'Banjee Realness', or 'Butch Queen First Time In Drags At A Ball'. These are categories created and developed within the queer ball community of mid-1980s New York. The categories have men perform a specific performance - one of dress, hair-styling, make-up, but also of attitude, of physical movement, of expression. Categories can tell a lot about the people doing the categorising.
It is difficult to describe the men and women who star in Paris is Burning, as to do so means categorisation, which in this case feels diminishing. The wonderful people at the heart of this documentary come from what they would have likely called the Hood, what the top-tier White class of the time would have called the Black and Hispanic community; we would refer to them today as People of Colour, a term broad enough to encapsulate many minority backgrounds. Not all are people of colour, but most are, and that in and of itself cannot be discounted. Even their status as men is called into question by they themselves. The entire ball performance is hooked on the notion that these are queer, usually feminine men, who perform to pass as specific types of women, or to pass as accurate caricatures of their straight counterparts, again in varying types.
Many of the subjects within the film wish to be exactly like the women they admire from magazines like Vogue, to the extent that many of them, if they can afford it, engage in surgery to become biologically closer to their goal. In modern terms this is transsexualism, an extension of being transgender. But in all honesty, it is difficult to say whether their need to feel like women comes from an internal voice or feeling (that which we today consider as one of the hallmarks of trans people), or is an extension of the ball environment. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Were these trans women drawn to the community to express their true selves, or did the community itself spark the light of questioning their identity and gender? These are questions which trans people find difficult to answer, let alone outsiders who categorise and classify.
Crucially, what makes the drag community so fascinating is that the exploration of identity, gender, and performance is so intertwined with the same internal exploration of the queer community. Of course transgender and transsexual people would be drawn to drag, as it allows the accentuation of the feminine from the societally gendered masculine body. It is an externalisation of the internal.
'Realness' is one of the most interesting topics presented by Paris is Burning. To be Real in the ball community is to have the ability to pass as straight to the trained, or even the untrained eye. This is such a loaded concept. It naturally assumes that if you have found yourself into the ball community, you are a feminine gay man. To the gay community of the time, being gay and being feminine went hand in hand. The feminine gay was something about yourself that was hidden in the straight world, and policed in terms of fashion, voice, and demeanour.
For the majority of the runtime of Paris is Burning, straight people are The Other, characterised as legion on the streets of New York, as the elite on the covers of magazines, and the beauty models of the fashion world. Only near the end do we gain an insight from straight people. What this achieves is full empathy, as the straight view of the community is utterly irrelevant, as odd as it may seem considering that many of the contestants desire to be among the glamour models of the straight world. Drag is a reaction to the straight world, it could not exist without it, but it would not exist without queer people.
The trophies that the ball contestants compete for feel like a carry-over from the straight community. They look identical to oversized racing trophies, or bowling trophies, hell probably some beauty pageant trophies somewhere. Trophies are symbols of victory, and in this case the victory is passing as a woman, a Real Woman, or a Real Straight Man. The trophies are as nondescript as a bowling trophy, and therefore almost act as symbols of this Realness. The contestants have done so well at being Real that they've won a trophy that could have been imported directly from the straight world. In that respect, the trophies themselves are almost playing a performance. They appear straight, but are proof of the victory of being queer.
The vast majority of the contestants of the New York balls came from poverty, and resort to the thieving the expensive designer clothes they vogue in, or even turn to sex work to afford their outfits. Some of the older contestants lament that the balls are all about the designer clothes, rather than the extravagance of outrageous fashion back in their day. There is a lineage and history to the balls, they are part of queer culture, a culture which continues to this day in shows like RuPaul's Drag Race. The balls are a world unto their own, and to many of the contestants they are processes of self-actualisation. Indeed what is life but continual self-actualisation?
To transsexual people self-actualisation is integral, they cannot feel themselves without this process. Therefore it becomes all the more tragic when the film closes with the news that Venus Xtravaganza was found four days after her death via strangulation under a seedy hotel bed. Throughout the film we have seen Venus detail the first day she met a drag queen, how she meets men who believe her to be a woman and are disgusted at the 'truth' of her biology, and how she wishes to go through surgery to become the real version of herself. The real version of herself. Think what that ball trophy must mean to people like Venus. Through competition, with shade passed or not, we can only hope that every trans person achieves the trophy of self-actualisation.
So who knows, perhaps categories are in fact integral to discovering one's true self? Can one only be, when one is outside of a category? The categories of the drag balls allow their contestants to become their true selves, their real selves. The balls are microcosms of the struggles everyone faces, but are nonetheless unique to the queer community. The film ends with the words of a wise-beyond-his-years fifteen year old:
"The religious community want to pray together a lot, right? Well, this gay community might want to all...all, they like want to be together."
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