We publish the text “Let’s take queer history into our own hands: Ballroom Culture” in english that was written in 2023 and presented in Antiviosi squat in Ioannina. The text was translated for BAB2025. We take a look at the history and the historical context in which ballroom culture was created and flourished and how we value it as part of the queer experience. We also draw a parallel to the Transvestite pageants that were held in Greece from some available sources. The text in greek can be found here: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1623133/

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Let’s take queer history into our own hands: Ballroom Culture

The beginnings of the drag ball culture can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century in the USA. The first masquerade queer ball was held in 1869 at the Hamilton Lodge Hall in Harlem, New York, where 500 same-sex couples attended to dance. Its format was similar to that of a ball of the elite.

Balls as a form of entertainment were maintained in the following years, and by the beginning of the next century they had taken the form of drag balls, i.e. fashion shows with performances in which drag queens participated. The events were organized by white gay men and were spaces accepting to homosexual and bisexual visibility, and even trans identities. From the late 19th century, with the abolition of slavery, balls were able to be multiracial, which potentially meant the gradual participation of black people in them.

Their rise in popularity in the 1920s in Harlem, New York, coincides with the “Harlem Renaissance,” which consisted of new currents of black literature, music, and politics and transformed the culture of the area while creating a vibrant nightlife.

At the same time, the law criminalising homosexual solicitation is being passed in New York, while we are in the Prohibition period, which affects the US in general. Prohibition was aimed at reducing crime and corruption, solving social problems and improving health and hygiene, affecting of course only the working class.

The entertainment that Harlem offered was hard to come by and created a condition of an influx of white people into the area for recreation, making it a hub for tourism, which in turn aggravated racial inequalities. In addition, the ball became a magnet for white tourists who were seeking trendy spots to consume the “exotic” spectacle of black people, while black artists were seeking white sponsors to promote their art.

The influence of the Queer artists of the Renaissance on ball culture was crucial, but the racial dynamics within it were strong. Black Queens were allowed to participate, but rarely won first prize – the first black winner at Hamilton Lodge’s annual drag balls was crowned in 1936 – and were expected to bleach their skin. In 1931 the cops began targeting the balls, reacting to Harlem’s cultural experimentation under the pressure of Prohibition and the rising Great Depression.

After World War II, the cops struggled to suppress the ball culture, stepping up their regulation of homosexuality as they went so far as to entrap gay men themselves. Balls, however, were bolstered by the wave of new arrivals of gay men returning from the war. A prime example was the ball in Rockland, Harlem, in March 1953, with more than 3,000 contestants and spectators, though many of them perceived the culture as exoticized.

During the 1960s there was a shift in the form of ball culture, where, as a reaction to racial inequalities, black Queens began to hold their own black-only balls, with the first black drag ball probably being in 1962. The format of these balls is one that is still maintained to this day.

At the same time, numerous mobilisations took place in the USA. The main movements that emerged were the anti-war and human rights movements for different social groups (african americans, women, trans people, gay people, native americans…). During this decade in many cities the african-american community revolted, the most notable examples being Los Angeles in 1965, followed by Detroit, Newark, Illinois and Maryland in 1967, while in 125 cities protests broke out over the assassination of Martin Luther King. Many of these riots were accompanied by black drag queens, and most of them were suppressed by military intervention.

Due to the black nationalism movement of the time, a certain image of a black cis man was promoted which went against the culture of drag, and as a result, ball was deemed as an inappropriate and dangerous pastime. Consequently, their holding hours were shifted to 3-4-5 in the morning to ensure the safety of the participants, as the market was closed. At the same time, these hours also allowed for the participation of sex workers who had evening working schedules.

The next transformation of the ball came with the establishment of the Houses as their organizational unit, where now the members of the Houses competed in the balls representing them. House members are queer young people of color who have been kicked out of their communities and biological families and are on the streets because of sexuality and gender identities that “deviate” from the “norm.”

Ballroom culture proposes social structures and economic units (as often the earnings of each individual were used collectively) beyond the heterosexist model of the nuclear family as well as new ways of collective belonging. Houses usually consisted of a mother and/or father and children. The mother and father, when both are present in the composition of the house, rarely live together or had romantic relationships. They act as companions to provide emotional support for the children and are role models for them. In addition they take charge of organizing the ball.There are no requirements to join a House, as long as the parents accept you.The names of the Houses are chosen by the parents and reflect values they stand for, fashion items or achievements. The children’s surname is the name of the House. The constitution of the Houses is changed when the children or parents wish to do so, having the option of transferring from one House to another and competing for it. Houses participated in balls, utilizing them at first as a way of expression but later, when the concept of cash prizes as prizes is introduced, also for livelihood reasons.This culture fluctuates between total deconstruction but also participation in the dominant heteronormative narratives around gender and sexuality.

The categories are a field for challenging normative standards. For example, the category “realness” shows how queer individuals dramatize normative gender perceptions based on stereotypes to live out a fantasy that would never have been possible before, and to make fun of it by re-normalizing it. Balls are sites where normality – especially heteronormativity – is challenged, parodied, becomes itself a product, appropriated and ultimately subverted. These allegorical representations of gender and sexuality are potentially energetic political fictions that work to prevent the exclusion of struggle around political notions of sex, sexuality and gender.

Voguing is a dance indicative of ballroom culture. Old way voguing, its first form, was influenced by the photographic poses of Vogue magazine. It was created by black trans women who used it as a tool not only for expression but also for organizing, empowerment and survival against the daily violence of white supremacist society. At the same time, it highlights issues that the community faces, such as homelessness, poverty, state violence and police brutality. Voguing is thus a embodied transcription of the history of resistance against white supremacy, as it uses exaggerated body postures and other semantic practices to turn towards the parodic dramatization and questioning – in political terms – of normality.

It is historically linked to the use of photography in the 19th century, as – like photography – it utilizes the snapshot. In the 19th century, Western doctors, criminologists and colonial officers associated posture, gestures and physiognomic traits as indicative of human behaviour , thus attaching meaningful markers in order to make bodies ”comprehensible” within a system of racial, gender and class prejudices. But posing, on which voguing is based, goes against these demands for understanding, as it is by definition a deliberate, contrived, exaggerated gesture , based on affectation and performance awareness. At the same time, the pose is undeniably self-erotic and self-involved, with the self becoming the fetish in a continuous act of self-creation and transformation.

The evolution of voguing results from the convergence of two worlds. That of the dominant fashion of the 1960s, where the arrogant poses of catwalk models became the main spectacle at fashion shows, and that of the black queer community.It began as a substitute for fights that might arise at a ball, in the form of dance battles, in order to reduce the element of violence. It derives from a broad kinesiological vocabulary. Inventiveness is important because in a “battle” they often have to improvise. In addition, it is imperative that children have a knowledge of the “politics of voguing”, i.e. understand the psychology of the judges and the audience. Humour and commentary enter the process, giving an optimistic tone, and the dance is always in a fluid situation that evolves, redefines and strategically adapts.

The stylistic innovations of voguing lie in the dialectic of cultural restoration, with the constant renegotiation of each individual’s distance from the dominant culture. This dynamic is the foundation of dance, and has shaped the ways in which vogue dancers make themselves understood.

In 1980 the first person with AIDS/HIV was detected on the USA. The appearance of this disease became the occasion for further marginalization of some social groups( as queer people, drug addicts etc) as most of the infected people were from these communities. With the AIDS crisis, cis gay men took a leading role in the ballroom scene, with their own modes of expression and competition taking precedence. Thus, of course, the trans people of color who created the ballroom scene “moved” into invisibility.

From the 90s onwards, with Madonna’s “vogue”, voguing and broader elements of ballroom culture enter the mainstream and then is when we see a first depoliticization of them. This depoliticization occurs because the mainstream is a means of domination, which creates and at the same time maintains a heteronormative colonial culture.

According to Halberstam, “mainstream culture in postmodernism should be defined as the process by which subcultures are both recognized and absorbed, primarily for the profit of large corporations… Most of the mainstream media’s interest in subcultures is voyeuristic and predator”.

Madonna, although she hired members of the Haus of Xtravaganza to dance in her Vogue, attached to voguing an aura of propriety and glamour, at the “price” of its convenient – for Madonna, and by extension, mainstream – removal. from its original source. Therefore, she restructured voguing into a sterile form, which would be suitable for mass consumption. What she actually did is move the Houses and the subculture into the commercialized world of entertainment

Madonna’s relationship with the ballroom scene has always been one of non-creative theft. Regarding Madonna’s cultural dealings with the African-American community and her seemingly subversive gender politics, Hooks says, “Madonna isn’t breaking any status quo of white supremacy and patriarchy—she supports and perpetuates them.” Her external status as a “white girl” is what allows her to colonize and appropriate the black experience for her own utilitarian purposes, even as she tries to market her racism as validation

Black trans women, in response to this depoliticization and commodification, evolved the vogue into an even harder, faster, nasty dance—the fem vogue—that would be difficult to teach, imitate, or even be appreciated by the white audience. In addition to Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez and FKA Twigs also have incorporated voguing into their shows, while Gaga has named her make-up company “Haus of Gaga”. . All of the above may indeed have been appropriated or borrowed from queer culture as “foreign” to it, but it is not something that queer consumers disapprove. Nevertheless, three decades later, the debate over whether Madonna appropriated or borrowed from queer culture is not as relevant. We cannot ignore that her involvement with the scene directly influenced/evolved the subculture itself , but with her name taking precedence over those who actually created it.

Many Houses saw this entry into popular/mainstream culture as an opportunity to emerge from social and cultural oblivion. With the commercialization of the ballroom scene and its “appreciation” by the mainstream media, we also see many “Houses” being created strictly as production companies, such as the aforementioned Haus of Gaga, who are simply “cool” extensions of the mainstream culture while they lack of any political edge that can be found in the ballroom’s radical beginnings.

At the same time, vogue has begun to be shown in music videos, exhibited at festivals and taught in dance schools, cultivating the idea that incase to be taken seriously as a vogue dancer you have to dance in places that involve money and consumption, doing nothing to fight the institutions that create the need for resistance.

On the one hand, when cultures are being policed and demarcated so strictly, in fact the cultural interactions are interrupted. Vogue itself has evolved by offering its language of gender fluidity to various communities worldwide, who in turn have adopted it and adapted it to their own needs and desires. Additionally, it would be a real setback if queer traditions like this were curtailed and closed off in order to preserve their authenticity. On the other hand, the visibility afforded by representation through the culture of commodification is a limited victory.

Beyond voguing, ballroom culture is also distinguished by the practice of drag. According to Butler, the critical function of drag is not to serve as “a sign of the essential plasticity of gender.” Rather, the real cutting edge lies in the fact that drag “exposes and allegorizes the everyday psychical and performative practices by which heterosexualized gender are formed through the disavowal of the possibility of homosexuality. The drag allegorizes heterosexual melancholia,” a term by which Butler means the original force behind the performative construction of normative genders. She goes on to say “in ballroom productions of realness we see and produce the imagined construction of a subject ,which repeats and imitates the legitimating norms by which the subject itself has been degraded”. This imaginative construction of the subject does not distinguish it from the normative subjects it recalls, since they too – and this is what realness reveals – are themselves imaginatively constructed and preserved.

Howell considers the following questions to be fundamental: “what is authentic in social roles? Who does our culture reward and exclude, and how do they differ from each other? What is masculine, what is feminine? Can our chromosomal wiring be reprogrammed?” and implies that asking these questions is itself a radical political act. Drag, like vogue, in itself leads us to these questions, bringing up the practice of ball as the medium for a subversive critique.

Paris is Burning, also released in the ’90s, is a documentary of great importance to the LGBTQ+ community as it highlights the need for queer expression within a rigid cisgendered and heteronormative society. This documentary is a politically astute, historically vital piece of filmmaking that documents the lives of individuals who have not typically had such a platform. However, it is problematic how, possibly the director, and certainly MIRAMAX, the company who later purchased the film, ultimately exploited the lives of individuals who were not visible to the world.

Although oppressed individuals in the Queer community were given a platform through the documentary, there was little to no improvement in their lives, unlike Miramax and the director who enjoyed fame and money. Specifically, two years after the release of the documentary, in a New York Times article the director -Jennie Livingstone- said: “now I’m a filmmaker… this is something I wasn’t before.” Instead, the queens featured in the documentary were left, at best, right where they were when it was filmed, and at worst dead.

The documentary was made with the consent of the participants, who then enthusiastically agreed to be part of it as they were finally given the much needed platform that they did not have, and objectively could not have had without the mediation of a white person. Some of these individuals, after the unexpected success of the documentary, felt betrayed as they made very little money compared to the overall revenue. Specifically, out of the approximately $4 million in proceeds, only $55,000 was given to 13 of the participants depending on how long each person appeared on camera. The money was donated at the director’s initiative. In general, according to journalistic ethics, paying people whose story is featured in a documentary is not necessary. This is why some of the other participants felt, on the contrary, that Livingstone was clear with them and did not take advantage of them at all. Besides, the director’s life after the success did not improve significantly either. The opinions about Livingstone are ambiguous.

What is certainly not ambiguous is that Miramax got rich then as it does now. Miramax LLC, also known as Miramax Films, is an American film and television production and distribution company, whose founder is also Harvey Weinstein, known for his abusive attitudes towards females in Hollywood. Companies like Miramax exploit queer experiences to make a profit, the so called “rainbow capitalism”, by changing their characteristics, making them converge with the norms of heteronormativity to make them more palatable. Thus, the queer is isolated from its struggling identity and becomes a “trend”, to the point where we can now talk about the one-dimensional queer.

Another milestone in the exposure of queer people in mainstream media is RuPaul’s Drag Race, a series originally released in 2009. RuPaul’s Drag Race gave queens the space to express the multifaceted elements of their identities, and celebrate them, as exemplified by BeBe Zahara Benet, who won the first season by bringing her African heritage as a central part of her drag. Of course, in a structure such as that of television, which is top-down, it is impossible to have an honest portrayal of art, let alone of art such as drag, which relies on the subjective position of the individual and the emergence ofthe pretentious persona, a highly political act when there is nowhere else that these subjectivities can be highlighted.

RuPaul’s Drag Race continues to be a reality TV show and as such, it is plagued by the same problems that characterize the genre. Because of said genre, RuPaul’s Drag Race has to follow a few rules in order to be a commercial show, one of them being the production of drama, either personal or in the form of tension between contestants. Because of this forced production, the personalities or even the personas of the queens are adjusted for the sake of commercial spectacle.

After all, we shouldn’t forget that RuPaul’s Drag Race is a business. Even Ru herself doesn’t want to admit her privileges and still appropriates the underdog position, even though RuPaul’s Drag Race has established itself in the mainstream by winning EMMY awards and securing a “good” social status for the majority of its contestants. With 14+ seasons now, RuPaul’s Drag Race has managed to not only establish a version of drag culture in the mainstream, but also present it as unique, appropriating words, phrases, actions and narratives from the 80-90’s ballroom scene – of which Ru herself was a part – and proposing them out of context to the mainstream. RuPaul’s Drag Race’s stance on drag is hardly political with clear neoliberal characteristics. At the same time, Ru’s stance on who is allowed to participate in drag is odd to say the least, as for many years it did not allow trans women to participate in the competition. The first trans woman to come out during the show was Peppermint, with Ru stating that because she had not had gender confirmation surgery it was fair to compete, even comparing gender confirmation surgeries in relation to the drag race to doping in the Olympics. On the other hand, countless contestants since the beginning of the series have had multiple plastic surgeries to accompany their drag persona. After pressure from fans of the show, the last few seasons have featured trans contestants, and the last one featured the first cis straight man to compete, obviously with much controversy.

As mentioned above, the only queer representations that can exist in sovereign contexts, such as that of the media, show only the digestible and non-threatening to normality side of it. This is obvious, as trans women who were pioneers of the ballroom scene were excluded from participating in RuPaul’s Drag Race, since the existence of trans identities was not considered sufficiently compatible with the heteronormative standards of society, of which the show is a byproduct. Instead, the participation of a cishet man was made unchallenged since his existence is compatible with the process of assimilating the queer and silencing his militancy. Viewing queer existence as a generally traumatic process, which is what RuPaul’s Drag Race seeks to do for greater popularity, is a very convenient condition for the patriarchy. It manages to simultaneously marginalize and “ rank” queer as a non-normative existence, establishing the notion of the normative (sic, straight) and displacing it into a pathology of its own but also putting queer in a constant process of division into well-defined identities that each individual can choose when they come out of the closet. Both of these processes limit the queer and reframe it from something fluid and constantly opposed to normality to a label-category that empowers.

In Greece, describing the atmosphere of the time, we are shortly after the dictatorship (xounta), in a country that desperately wants to imitate the supposedly progressive Europe, without wanting to eliminate its conservatism.

The queer people of the time are faced with very hostile laws, such as the “On venereal diseases and other related matters” passed in 1981 by Karamanlis, which legalises the persecution of women, transsexuals and homosexuals. “A male shall be punished by imprisonment for up to one year if he wanders in the streets, squares, public centres or other places for the apparent purpose of attracting males to commit sexual intercourse against him”, one of the provisions in question stated. Police raids had already been stepped up in streets and other spaces, often accompanied by beatings and humiliation, and the number of arrests of transgender sex workers – the only way of survival at the time for most of them – had increased. In those years, dozens of protests, scuffles with police and hunger strikes by outraged trans people broke out, but also more reformist actions with the founding of the Akoe (Liberation Movement of Homosexuals of Greece), a movement that, according to its members, was started by a group of homosexuals directed at other homosexuals, with the aim of promoting their common interests.

In this context, the first transvestite pageants were held in Athens in 1980 and in Thessaloniki in ’88. They were held in cinemas, with the exception of 1987 in Athens at Akropol and the prizes were very different from year to year, from cash prizes and jewellery of 30,000 drachmas to Aloma pornographic films. The formula, however, was more or less the same. They started with an introduction of the judges, usually other transvestite-workers or as they presented themselves “community workers” but also other friendly people. They continued with some variety show which usually had a strip show, some Oriental dancing, miming, and folk. The highlight of the evening was the beauty catwalk which was divided into two parts, the gown and the swimsuit. They competed for the titles of Star Transvestite, Miss Hellas, and Miss Young.

It was a very entertaining spectacle with people having a good time, but in between scenes from the preserved videos, the presenters and other people defended the community and encouraged the audience to not ignore their oppression. In the ’88 beauty pageant in Athens, the presenter says “One day I want the day to come when transvestites don’t do prostitution out of necessity. Other professions should be a solution for survival too”, a strong feeling at the time. The information we have available from this pageant is only because of Nana’s participation. Nana, also known as the Big Diva, was a well-known transgender former sex worker and activist active in Thessaloniki who died in 2015.

Also, in Thessaloniki in ’88, Aloma, a well-known sex worker and trade unionist fighting for the rights of transvestites and women in Syngrou, organizes the first beauty pageant in northern Greece and presents P.A.K.I. (Panhellenic Equality Movement), a party that we really can’t understand whether it was really aimed at the parliament or was just trolling and provocative action. However, what is worth noting is that in her self-presentation, apart from a naked transvestite who was next to her throughout as a mascot, she talked about the liberation of prisoners and the destruction of prisons, about legal state violence through the cops, proper sex education, the right of trans people to work, the destruction of the male-female binary, the position of women and called for intersectional struggles with workers, students, Roma, people who have been released from prison, social and ethnic minorities and the mentally ill.

The ’88 beauty pageant is at the beginning of the post-movement, just a year after the dissolution of the AOKOE and the general weakening of the revolutionary left after the domination of PASOK in the political scene. “At that time there was a big movement gap that only the beauty contests filled,” said a friend of Nana’s. Besides, what probably prompted the transsexuals to form the PAKI party was the unjust imprisonment of another transvestite, Andrianna, who after being constantly verbally harassed by a man on a motorbike throws a stone to scare him and ends up losing his balance and dying. While the outcry was huge, there was a huge mobilization by street transvestites, who organized marches and protests, resulting in her release a year later.

We find it very important as queer individuals not to forget our history, and then to reproduce it on our own terms. We see queer history as not place-centric, but rather as a history that is inherent within each queer person and permeates concepts such as space and time. Thus, we find ourselves connected to histories far removed both locally and temporally from ourselves. We see this fluidity as one of the core subversive elements that distinguish queerness and consider it important to preserve this as the essence rather than the decontextualized reproduction of queer culture. It is important to remember that this history is written on the backs of trans women of color whose contributions have been forgotten countless times for the purpose of profiteering and whitewashing.

We believe that the revival of our history should be done in our own spaces, by our own means, and not by the dominant narrative that misappropriates our common history and makes it an echo of what it really represents.

Anarcha queer-fem collective Tsoupres