“In real life,” says Dorian Corey, star of Jennie Livingston’s touchstone 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning, “you can’t get a job as an executive unless you have the educational background and the opportunity.” That is just “the social standing of life.”
Hence drag—and hence the fundamental importance of this subculture to the people it serves. Drag is predicated on twisting the truths of life into slippery, thought-provoking, intimate fantasies: “In a ballroom,” says Corey, “you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive, but you’re looking like an executive. And therefore you’re showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity, I could be one. Because I can look like one.”
Paris Is Burning, which was re-released in select New York theaters this month, has persisted all these years in part due to the charisma of lines like these—sharp, complex, a life’s worth of wisdom packed into a few punchy sentences—and in part due to the substance of the wisdom itself. The queens in the movie keep delivering this message, each in their own way: “I would like to be a spoiled, rich white girl,” says Venus Xtravaganza. “They get what they want, whenever they want it.” So Venus’s style of drag is poised, moneyed, effortlessly feminine, aspirational, the epitome of what the queens call realness: drag so seamless it blends with the realities that it mimics, to the point of a bystander being unable to tell the difference.
Drag refuses to take our identities at their word, exposing the ways that femininity, or the class rituals of wealth, are put on to begin with. These identities, in other words, are not natural: they’re signifiers, telling the world a story about who the person on display is supposed to be. They’re already drag.
It’s no wonder that in addition to being cherished and debated over the years, Paris Is Burning has often been taught in colleges and beyond, an urtext for debates about the meanings of gender, race, class, and sexuality. The film is largely credited for bringing Corey, Venus, and the other queens heaps of public visibility, to say nothing of Harlem ball culture itself and the language of “shade,” “reading,” and the like—paving the way for the mainstreaming of drag culture later facilitated by RuPaul’s Drag Race in the aughts.
But the story of what drag culture is and why—as told by the queens themselves for the people who love it—is what makes the film so vital. Paris wasn’t the first documentary about the drag scene. It wasn’t even the first piece of pop culture to rip the art of voguing from its ball context and push it in front of the rest of the world. Madonna’s hit single “Vogue,” released the year before the doc, had already played some part in that, hastening the speed with which the public face of this black and Latino subculture was no longer the people at its center.
Yet even someone familiar with the complicated history of the movie’s reception can’t help but get sucked into the lives and loves of the people Livingston filmed. Pepper LaBeija, Kim Pendavis, Dorian Corey, Venus Xtravaganza, Angie Xtravaganza, Willi Ninja: if you’ve seen seen the documentary, but particularly if you’re a queer minority of a certain age who once longed to express yourself and your sexuality in ways that you didn’t yet understand, these names and faces are seared into your memory. The film is an education: a way into a lifestyle that even many of us who share an identity with the people onscreen otherwise had no access to, because this culture felt—still feels—so specific to a time and place.
Which is part of the reason the movie’s legacy remains so complicated. It was directed by a white filmmaker with relative financial and social privilege: a complete outsider to ball culture. It went on to win a prize at Sundance, get a distribution deal with Miramax, and land raves from publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times—all signs, to some, that the movie was intended from the outset to be consumed by white audiences.
At least one star has spoken out against the film over the years. “I love the movie. I watch it more than often, and I don’t agree that it exploits us,” said LaBeija, mother of the House of LaBeija, and one of the documentary’s most memorable storytellers, to the New York Times in 1993. “But I feel betrayed. When Jennie first came, we were at a ball, in our fantasy, and she threw papers at us. We didn’t read them, because we wanted the attention. We loved being filmed. Later, when she did the interviews, she gave us a couple hundred dollars. But she told us that when the film came out, we would be all right. There would be more coming.” The film went on to make $4 million, according to Miramax, and a battle raged between some of the featured performers and the distributor over compensation. In the end, about $55,000 was divided among 13 performers, based on screen time.
The specter of exploitation has trailed the film ever since, and left a bad taste in the mouths of many. A screening organized in Brooklyn in 2015 drew controversy from the ballroom community and queer people of color for its failure, among other things, to rightfully acknowledge the current, living contributors to drag culture. There was a sense, in the discussions sparked by the petition, that awareness and affection for the documentary had done nothing to curb the gentrified attitudes that have long threatened ball culture and the people in it—a rich, dangerous irony.
Now a new restoration of Paris Is Burning is playing at Film Forum in New York, and will soon be playing across the country. It should, among other things, spur a new leg in this ongoing conversation. The timing couldn’t be more apt: this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which arrives at a fraught time in queer visibility. Marriage rights have been constitutionally secured while trans people nationwide face bathroom bans and gender discrimination; trans women of color are routinely murdered to little political interest or fanfare; and rates of homeless LGBT youth remain dire.
The AIDS crisis was in full swing as Livingston filmed in the late ’80s, and would come to touch many of the lives we see in her movie. Today, by contrast, we have medications that, while still not universally affordable, can suppress the disease to the point of it being undetectable in the blood. Even that progress has a silver lining: black and Latino men still account for a disproportionate number of HIV diagnoses. Today the language of drag has been mainstreamed—to the point where its origin in ball culture has been almost completely obscured.
The people served by drag have never been more visible, in other words, and Paris Is Burning is an essential part of that narrative. Politically, however, the promise of visibility has not totally borne out. The movie plays a part in that narrative too.
“There was no convincing” queens to participate in this movie, Livingston told me over the phone a few weeks ago, echoing what Pepper LaBeija once told the Times. “People really wanted to talk about their lives. They were interested in the fact that I was interested.” You sense that excitement watching the film, which alternates between scintillating scenes of ballroom action and interviews with Corey, LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza, and other memorable personalities. You see the ideas and definitions we’re being given by our narrator queens being put to action on the ballroom floor. And you get a firsthand sense of the competition and one-upmanship undergirding it all. A queen says hers is the best house. Cut to: another queen saying she would never be in that house. Each piece of the documentary feels like part of a larger conversation, a group narrative in which the queens’ insights both ricochet and sing in harmony.
“I wasn’t trying to make a film about people doing something in private, in secret,” Livingston said. “I was making a film about people who have really loud, really raucous events. I mean, they weren’t in public—well, no, they were in public, actually, because the subculture found expression on the piers. It was more like—people, they know they have a lot to give. They know they’re talented. They know they’re beautiful. They know their culture is an extraordinary expression. I was just someone coming along and saying, ‘I’d like to tell that story. Are you interested?’ Most people were.”
Livingston noted that there were other people at the balls with cameras—other people documenting this history. Whether they wanted to turn that footage into feature films, rather than home movies, is not clear. If they had, they would have faced the same difficulties getting funding that Livingston did. “In terms of funding, that was really very, very, very hard,” she said. “People were like, ‘No one’s going to want to see this film. No one’s going to pay to see this film’...Most of the people with the decision to greenlight are straight white men. And they don’t want to see it, so they don’t understand how anyone else would want to see it.”
The film was an outgrowth of Livingston’s interest in photography. “I didn’t always want to be a filmmaker,” she said, “but it didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t be a filmmaker.” She met some voguers while taking a film class at NYU, and eventually wound up at a ball with a windup Bolex camera—which is when she saw the potential in turning this into a movie.
She wouldn’t have been able to do so, she told me, if not for her two executive producers. Madison D. Lacy, the black producer of Eyes on the Prize, “saw what the film looked like, what it could do,” said Livingston. “He saw the intricacies of African American culture. He wasn’t gay. But he got that impulse. And he got the energy and the meaning of what was happening in the culture.” It was Lacy who pointed out the similarities between shade and “reading” in ball culture and similar black practices of signifying and playing the dozens; he advised Livingston to read Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey. Nigel Finch, meanwhile, was a producer at the BBC who came to New York to see Livingston’s footage—“Again, no way to send footage in that era,” Livingston reminded me—and immediately got what she was going for.
It’s for these reasons that Livingston objects to the simplistic idea that her movie was “for white people”—that Paris is necessarily problematic because it was made by a white filmmaker. “The sense that this was a production by white people, for white people—that’s not historical,” she said. “That is a projection, rather than a truth. You have to see Paris Is Burning in the context of nonfiction.” She held a similar stance in 1993, telling the Times that “if they”—i.e., the black and brown queer people of the ballroom community— “wanted to make a film about themselves, they would not be able.” Meaning that no one would fund their work.
This is largely true, but there are also notable exceptions to Livingston’s position. Marlon Riggs, for example, was a black, queer experimental documentarian who’d made multiple films about race, AIDS, and queerness by the time Paris Is Burning was released. And he did so on his own terms—beyond the institutional validation of the festival system, unnoticed by the likes of Miramax.
Livingston’s whiteness, she freely admits, helped her get this film made, even as her gender proved to be a barely surmountable hindrance in the very male world of the film industry. The conversation about who profited from Paris wrestles directly with her relative privilege even as, in Livingston’s eyes, it misunderstands the real phenomenon at play. “When you look at class in America,” she said, “middle-class people tend to stay middle class. Working-class people tend to stay working class. Underclass people tend to stay underclass. And rich people tend to stay rich. That was not a condition that Paris Is Burning created.” In other words, she didn’t get rich off of the movie—but wound up with the same advantages she already had.
What makes this conversation painful is the through line of class privilege—a privilege Venus Xtravaganza constantly reminds us of in the documentary, in her open longing for a life that her identity precludes her from ever having. It’s the difference between being famous and rich, as Pepper—who became something of a known quantity thanks to the film, like a few other queens—told the Times in ’93. “A California magazine said I had sued Miramax and won untold millions and was seen shopping with Diana Ross on Rodeo Drive in a Rolls,” Pepper, who was 44 at the time, said. ”But I really just live in the Bronx with my mom. And I am so desperate to get out of here! It’s hard to be the mother of a house while you’re living with your own mother.”
It’s to the film’s credit—and to the credit of the queens who, despite any misgivings after the fact, gave so much of themselves in Paris—that the film itself already seems to grapple with much of this tension. The realities the queens and their supporters continually talk about—their homelessness, their inability to have the lifestyles promised by shows like Dynasty—are also realities at the heart of the documentary’s making. In so many ways this is a story about the privileges of identity, and the ways that those excluded from those privileges have found to question and subvert them.
Which only makes the conversation stirred up by the film even more worth having. And all that chatter also gives Livingston, as well as the audience, a chance to reflect back on the movie’s moment. “There was an intensity to how we lived and how we came together,” Livingston said of that period in her life, “because there was an intense need for sustenance for the community and for each other.” Paris Is Burning is the proof.
CORRECTION: This post has been updated to clarify the nature of the dispute between some of Paris Is Burning*’s* subjects and its makers.
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