Paris is Burning
Directed by Jennie Livingstone. Reviewed by Penny Saunders
Madonna may have made "vogueing" a popular dance, but Paris is Burning, which won best documentary at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, traces the development of this dance style to the world of black and latino transvestites in New York.
The film focuses on Harlem drag balls, which have been part of drag queen culture since the 1920s. It challenges the portrayal of drag queen culture as being simply extravagant costumes, sequins, feathers and false eyelashes.
This style of drag reached its height in the 1960s, but during the late 1980s the balls have become an arena where gays can play out many roles, including executives, straight men and models. Competitors are usually awarded prizes for how "real" they look — the extent to which they look exactly like a young woman, executive or even a mugger. Vogueing in this context is a stylised competitive dance, mimicking the poses of runway modelling.
Paris is Burning also documents the kinship created amongst ball-goers. Each ball-walker becomes a member of a house or family and takes the fictive family name of an older drag queen, the "mother" who cares for the younger competitors. One "mother" comments that usually the younger transvestites have no real family or home, and so create new bonds of affection and family within the gay ball-walking community.
The emphasis on "realness" and the creation of new kinship ties exposes the social construction of categories which are presented in white, heterosexual culture as natural and immutable. The ability of drag queens to pose as "real girls" — some even gain success as models — reveals that gender is a learned construct and raises the question of what exactly constitutes femininity in US society.
The film maker comments, "If any man who cares to can become a perfect woman, one who men turn to look at on the street, it demonstrates that we learn our gender. We learn to be feminine, men learn to swagger." Likewise, the ball houses demonstrate that the heterosexual nuclear family is not the only form of kinship that humans can create.
Finally, the film graphically portrays the oppression that gays, transvestites and transsexuals face. Venus Extravaganza, a black transvestite, longs to be a "rich, white girl" and have a white wedding. Of course this dream proves to be unattainable,
and later Angie Extravaganza, the House of Extravaganza mother, reveals that Venus was murdered while working as a prostitute — apparently not an uncommon way for a New York transvestite to die.
It is clear too that the balls represent the closest approximation of unattainable goals for most of the ball-walkers. It is a fantasy to believe that in a homophobic and racist society, a black transvestite could become a real company executive. Paris is Burning is a rare and surprising representation of how the issues of race, gender and homosexuality are enmeshed in the class system of the United States.