Paris Is Burning (Art Matters Inc., BBC Television, Edelman Family Fund, Miramax, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Off White Productions Inc., Prestige, The Jerome Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Paul Robeson Fund, WNYC-TV, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the third film on TCM’s Queer agenda on June 30 was both a much better movie and a more interesting showcase for its participants. It was called Paris Is Burning and was about the low-budget drag “ball” scene in New York City in the late 1980’s. It began with a long credits sequence acknowledging UCLA’s help with restoring it, which led me to comment that it seemed decidedly odd that a film made in 1990 should need restoration. My husband Charles noted how grainy the initial images were and said, “If this is what it looks like restored, I’m afraid to think of what it looked like before.” Although at least Paris Is Burning is in color – it had to be to do justice to the stunning drag outfits many of the cast members wore – it was a pretty low-budget production. It was produced and directed by Jennie Livingston, a white Jewish woman graduate of Yale University, and since virtually all the film’s participants were people of color she was almost inevitably accused of “cultural appropriation” for having made a film about marginalized Black and Brown people. Paris Is Burning dealt with a well-defined “ball” culture in New York City’s Harlem in the late 1980’s, and my first surprise was that though the film centered around a series of contests in which the winners got elaborate trophies, they weren’t all drag shows. A number of the pageants were for the most convincing contestants dressed as men, particularly as business executives in the nation’s capital of high finance, which the participants interviewed for the film admit is because they couldn’t really hope to score such jobs because they weren’t well-to-do enough to get the education needed for jobs like that. So they did the best they could and posed as high-class business executives, just as their drag-queen brethren posed as movie stars or fashion models.

Paris Is Burning is an almost anthropological look at an intriguing subculture, in which the participants in the ball contests are generally members of “houses.” Some of them analogize these to street gangs, but they generally aren’t violent (though there’s a thin edge of angry rivalry among contestants who believe they’ve been unfairly cheated out of a prize that was rightfully theirs). They do give their members a sense of belonging, a sense of “family” that they didn’t get from their real ones, many of whom threw them out once they realized they were Gay. One young queen actually tells how his mother discovered his mink coat and, as revenge and punishment, actually took it into the back yard and literally burned it. The houses generally took their names either from the world of fashion (one is called “Saint Laurent”) or of overall hype (“Xtravaganza,” “Ninja,” “LaBeija,” “Duprée”), and most of the members use the names of their houses as their drag names. Needless to say, as with every subculture the New York “ball” scene developed its own slang, including “voguing” (a set of staccato dance moves styled, as the voguers in the movie acknowledged, after the designs on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs), “mopping” (shoplifting garments from high-end fashion stores that they couldn’t afford to pay for), “reading” and “shining.” The latter two denote the same kinds of insult games earlier young Black men in the 1920’s and 1930’s called “dozening” – challenges to each other to see who could come up with the most creative and stinging insults – which were also at least part of the origins of rap music.

And as usual in these sorts of movies about subcultures, there’s an éminence grise in the person of Dorian Corey, who recalls the days during which he was starting out on the scene. He reminisced about the days when the great drag queens actually made their own clothes instead of buying (or stealing) them ready-made from major designers (it’s fascinating to hear the sneer in his voice when he says the word “designers”). He also said that during his early days, when all the other drag queens wanted to play Marilyn Monroe, he wanted to be Lena Horne – the first clue we have that this remarkably light-skinned person is actually Black. Paris Is Burning may have raised issues of cultural appropriation due to the white skin and relative privilege of its director, but they got even worse when Madonna, also in 1990, released a song called “Vogue” that at once hailed and exploited the Black drag subculture depicted in the film. People who’d never heard of “voguing” before Madonna’s song (including me) assumed it meant striking the “pose” of a famous movie star, past or current, because that’s how Madonna’s lyric described it. The reality as shown in Paris Is Burning is quite different; while certainly many of the “queens” in the shows were riffing off celebrities (there’s one fascinating scene in which a heavy-set Black drag queen mimes to Patti LaBelle’s hit record of “Over the Rainbow,” wearing a headdress that was intended to simulate the really weird wigs LaBelle was wearing then that made her look like an upturned lawnmower), “voguing” as depicted here is a dance form with its own integrity, at least a cousin of break dancing.

There are also some fascinating scenes showing the “queens” wrestling with their own gender identities, including one woman at a beach who boasts that she’s just had gender reassignment and therefore is truly a woman in every sense except the genetic. Two more said they haven’t had the operation yet but are contemplating it, while a more down-to-earth type named Pepper LaBeija insists that they aren’t going to go through Transgender surgery because once they take it off, they can’t put it back on again if they decide they miss it after all. It reminded me of the high rate of suicide among Trans people both pre- and post-op, as if Trans people have an inflated idea of the worth of surgical gender change – “If only they make me a real woman, I’ll be truly happy at last” – and are disappointed when surgical reassignment doesn’t magically solve all their problems. Also one of the most moving aspects of this film is the distance between the dreams these people have and the reality of who, what, and where they are. One notes the irony of the fact that one of the main balls is called “Paris Is Burning” (hence the film’s title) and says he’s always wanted to go to the real Paris. Another, a member of the Ninja house, says they want to go to Tokyo because Japan is the home of the real ninjas.

The most tragic story in the film is that of a young, petite, blonde, stunningly attractive performer who boasts that for a while he was kept by a straight sugar daddy – until the man found out that he wasn’t biologically female and immediately threw him out. His dreams were to get a sex change and find another sugar daddy who would love him as a real woman. He also shame-facedly admits that he survives largely by hustling, though at first he says that only 1 percent of his clients actually want to have sex with him. Later he revises that estimate to only 5 percent (which my husband Charles noted was still a 500 percent increase!). At the end of the film we learn that he was found dead under a bed in a cheap hotel; though we’re not told what happened to him, we’re guessing that one of those tricks went horribly wrong. Paris Is Burning is a fascinating glimpse into a group of (mostly; there are certainly some who qualify as Trans) Gay men who have built a world for themselves in which they can be celebrities and even stars even though most of the rest of the world hasn’t heard of them. It offers some fascinating glimpses into the whole nature of celebrity and institutionalized ideas of “glamour” (one queen sniffs that “voguing” is called that after Vogue magazine and it certainly would never have done to name it after Mademoiselle because that name had no cachet), and how certain people who are well aware that most of the world will remain blissfully aware of their own existence can still find stardom within their own world in which they and their kind have all the power. The final contest attracts three celebrity judges: Black actor and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, comedienne and author Fran Lebowitz, and Broadway legend Gwen Verdon – and at last the real world of stardom meets the world of the ball scene!