If you enjoyed the premiere of Ryan Murphy’s FX series Pose last night and are looking for more — or if you didn’t like Pose, and are looking for other media on the ballroom scene — we’ve got you covered. Here are a few books, movies, and YouTube channels that explore and explain the rich history of ball culture.
House of Naphtali’s Vogue-Cabulary
As anyone will quickly gather from watching even the first episode of Pose, the ballroom scene is a rich and complex social world with its own rituals, social expectations, and language. Confused about what “femme queens” and “butch queens” are? Unsure of the difference between a “legend,” a “statement,” and an “icon”? Check out this dictionary put together by the House of Naphtali, a national house with members from Florida to Michigan to California.
How Do I Look
Everyone knows about Paris Is Burning, Jenny Livingston’s famous and controversial 1990 documentary about the ball scene in New York City, which won Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance and was recently added to the National Film Registry. But if you want to know where much of Pose has its origins, look no further than the 2006 documentary, How Do I Look.
Conceived by members of the ballroom community, along with filmmaker Wolfgang Busch, as something of a follow up, How Do I Look was made to show what Paris Is Burning missed, from the history of voguing (which began among people of color imprisoned on Riker’s Island), to lesbians in ball culture, to safer-sex education via the balls, to the career successes of some of the scene’s most prominent members. At times, the film veers into comments and questions that feel transphobic; at others, it feels powerfully trans-celebratory; and on occasion, it offers visions and understandings of transgressing gender that are very different from the ones we typically see on screen today.
Luna Luis Ortiz has been a member of the ballroom community since the mid-1980s, and was one of the creators of How Do I Look. When he’s not working as a community health specialist with Gay Men’s Health Crisis, he’s also a highly respected photographer who has worked with everyone from David LaChapelle to Nan Goldin. For years, Ortiz has chronicled New York City’s ball scene via his YouTube channel, The Luna Show. As he told the organization Visual AIDS upon being honored with their 10th Annual Vanguard Award, “the Luna Show started because I got tired of people referencing Paris Is Burning.” His hundreds of videos feature interviews with members of the scene, footage of balls, voguing lessons, safer sex messages, and more.
(Full disclosure: Ortiz and I worked together at the Hetrick Martin Institute, and The Luna Show is featured in a video project I co-created for World AIDS Day in 2016)
Butch Queen Up In Pumps
For a more academic (and less New York-centric) take on ballroom, pick up Marlon Bailey’s 2013 book Butch Queen Up In Pumps. The title is taken from the category he walked while doing embedded research for his PhD with Detroit’s House of Prestige. Bailey’s book offers a deep dive into some of the more technical details that are often left out of film depictions of voguing: how the balls are actually organized and executed, how gender identity is understood in the scene, and more. Unlike many academic texts, Bailey offers a compelling narrative — his own experiences with the House of Prestige, and his childhood growing up in Detroit — to keep readers engaged even when the book becomes more sociological or theoretical in focus.
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