Gay ballroom

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With that, all across the world, people were dancing like they were in Harlem — though they may not have known it at the time.

And that for me, because of who is doing it, is very much an act of resistance to an entire world that not only tells us that our lives are devoid of meaning, but also tells us that we have nothing to contribute.

“It provides the basic kind of kinship structure, and also demonstrates alternative possibilities for what kinship can look like. “And you begin to see the shift again from mother-children to mother-father-children, so men begin to participate. And so, ballroom morphs from drag ball to a house ball,” Roberson says.

Instead of the pageant-style of competition in drag balls, house balls held competitions between houses by categories.

The film is often referenced within the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. Ballroom culture is still a major part of LGBT+ culture today, and people from as far away as Mexico City, São Paulo, Santiago, New York, Paris, and Berlin find family and community in the ballroom scene.

The five fundamental elements of vogue fem include hands, catwalk, duckwalk, spins and dips (which are often erroneously referred to as “shablams” or “death drops”) and floor performance, according to Glover.

Willi Ninja described voguing as a way of throwing shade, or criticizing, opponents on the dance floor, in the 1990 documentary “Paris is Burning.” But, beyond a dance style and competition, voguing came to represent much more.

“Voguing is very much about telling one's story through movement...

But there are moments when the scene comes up for air and emerges through the water, making a splash within the popular culture scene before returning to the oceans depths while those on the surface feel its ripples for quite some time.”

Why The Harlem Ballroom Scene Was Important To The Black And Latinx LGBTQ+ Community

From the early Masquerade Balls in Harlem through the Harlem Renaissance and finally to the House Ballroom scene, music, dance, and fashion were always central, NME writes.

“And it's in relationship to break dancing. Categories range from face (the judging of a house members’ beauty) to body (the appreciation of a house members’ curves), to runway, to performances including vogue.

Voguing Begins as Pop Dip and Spin

Vogue is a type of improvisational dance inspired by the poses of models in fashion magazines.

This signified a shift from trans women and female-presenting people in house ballroom to the inclusion of gay men and male-presenting people in houses and house ballroom. “It primarily dwells deep, deep, deep in the ocean. “It's a kind of resistance, an embodied kind of resistance, to these cultural messages. These houses became more like families than teams, led by house “mothers” or house “fathers” to guide and groom their house “children” for the world.

“In ballroom, houses offer the primary infrastructure upon which the scene is built,” explains Glover.

The iconic documentary Paris is Burning explored ballroom culture in 1980s NYC, with the documentary Kiki more recently exploring the same in 2016. The ballroom scene was born in Harlem in black and Latinx communities, by those who had been kicked out of their homes and families. But when people who were double jointed, who were acrobatic, started putting that in their vogues, then they wanted to call it a new way of voguing, and call pop, dip and spin, old way.”

This “old way” of pop, dip and spin vogue dates back to the 1970s and 1980s.

Some now trace vogue to imprisoned gay, trans, and queer people at New York's Rikers Island, TIME reported in 2021. Then other elements of the dance were ushered in during the early 1990s, to form two new types of vogue dancing, called “new way” and “vogue fem.”

While new way is characterized by precise movement of the arms, wrists and hands, vogue fem is broken down into either fast, angular movements or much slower, sensual and deliberate movements.