Paris Is Burning: the film, the people and the ballroom scene

Paris Is Burning is a documentary by Jennie Livingston about the drag balls of New York in the late 1980s and the people who made them, a community Livingston describes as Black and Latino gay and trans New Yorkers building sustenance, creativity and family. It premiered in 1990, won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1991, and was added to the US National Film Registry in 2016. It has been argued about ever since: who it shows, who it was made for, and who was paid.

What the film is

Livingston started going to balls and interviewing people in the mid-1980s. The film takes its name from one of those balls, called Paris Is Burning, which was filmed in 1986 on Livingston's own money. Sources date the rest of the shoot to between 1987 and 1989, once funding arrived from grants and from the New York public television station WNYC. More than 75 hours of 16mm footage were cut down to 78 minutes.

It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 13 September 1990 and opened in New York on 13 March 1991. Along with the Sundance prize, it won the Teddy Award for best documentary at the Berlin film festival and best documentary from the New York and Los Angeles film critics' associations. It was not nominated for an Oscar, which drew accusations at the time that the Academy was homophobic and transphobic.

The people in it talk about poverty, racism, violence, homophobia and AIDS, often in the same breath as clothes, trophies and fame. You hear Livingston's questions but, as bell hooks pointed out, never see the person asking them, a choice that became part of the argument about the film.

Ballroom, explained plainly

Drag balls in the US go back a long way: the Hamilton Lodge Ball of 1869 is often cited as the first on record. The scene in the film grew out of that history. In 1972, Crystal and Lottie LaBeija founded the House of LaBeija, usually counted as the first ballroom house. By the time Livingston arrived, ballroom was a world with its own families, rules and language.

• Balls. Competitions where people, called walkers, compete in themed categories for trophies and recognition. Some are small; some last more than eight hours.
• Houses. Groups that compete together and work as families. Members take the house name as a surname, which is why so many people in the film are called LaBeija, Xtravaganza, Ninja or Pendavis. It is chosen family in its most organised form.
• Mothers and fathers. The heads of a house, who guide and look after their house children. A mother is a role, not a gender: the dancer Willi Ninja was the mother of the House of Ninja.
• Categories. The themes walkers compete in, each with rules about how to dress and what to show. Categories such as high fashion, voguing and realness give walkers a chance to show off style, talent and presence.
• Realness. How convincingly you embody the category, whether that is a business executive or a soldier. It is often described as the ability to pass, which is close to what is now usually called passing, a word with its own baggage.
• Reading. The art of the insult: finding someone's flaws and naming them with wit. As Dorian Corey puts it in the film, reading came first.
• Shade. Reading refined into something quieter. Corey's definition became famous: "Shade is, I don't tell you you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you, because you know you're ugly." Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in 2017.
• Voguing. A dance built from the poses of fashion models, as if being photographed for the cover of Vogue, with a lot of precise arm and hand work. Willi Ninja is the film's great voguer.

The people in it

The film is a set of portraits more than a story. Here are its main figures, described the way the sources describe them.

• Dorian Corey, an older drag performer and designer and the founder of the House of Corey, who does most of the explaining and gives the film its definitions of reading, shade and realness.
• Pepper LaBeija, mother of the House of LaBeija, described in accounts of her life as a drag queen.
• Willi Ninja, the dancer who founded the House of Ninja in 1982 and was its mother. The film follows his voguing out of the balls and into work as a choreographer, including a music video for Malcolm McLaren.
• Angie Xtravaganza, mother of the House of Xtravaganza.
• Venus Xtravaganza, born in Jersey City in 1965, who joined the House of Xtravaganza in 1983; Angie later became her house mother. She is described as a trans woman, and in the film she talks about her hopes plainly: "I want to be a complete woman."
• Octavia St. Laurent, who is seen posing for a modelling portfolio and attending a model search run by Eileen Ford of Ford Models. Early in her life she identified as transgender. In her last interview, given in 2009 and later published by Dazed, she described herself differently: "I was born intersex", she said, and she did not want to be called a woman. The glossary explains what intersex means.
• Junior LaBeija, the emcee, whose commentary runs through the balls.

Others appear too, including members of the Pendavis and Xtravaganza houses. Almost everyone on screen is Black or Latino, and poverty runs through many of their stories.

What happened to them

Many of the people in Paris Is Burning did not live long after it. By 2003, a New York Times article described the film as a portrait of several remarkable Americans, almost all of whom had died since it was made. The ballroom community as a whole was hit very hard by AIDS.

Venus Xtravaganza

Venus was killed before the film was finished. In December 1988 she was found strangled in a New York hotel room, at the age of 23; accounts differ on the exact dates and the name of the hotel. Nobody has been arrested. The New York police reopened the case while the documentary I'm Your Venus, directed by Kimberly Reed, was being made, and after testing the evidence they came to believe that the person once suspected may not be responsible. The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2024, follows her biological family and her ballroom family working together to find out what happened.

The others

• Angie Xtravaganza died in March 1993, in her late twenties, of AIDS-related liver disease.
• Dorian Corey died in August 1993 of AIDS-related complications.
• Pepper LaBeija died in 2003, and remained head of the House of LaBeija until then.
• Willi Ninja kept working as a dancer and teacher, modelled for Jean-Paul Gaultier and opened a modelling agency in 2004. He died in 2006 of AIDS-related heart failure, at 45.
• Octavia St. Laurent became an HIV and AIDS educator and appeared in How Do I Look, Wolfgang Busch's 2006 documentary about the ball scene. She died in 2009 after a cancer diagnosis. Looking back, she called the time of Paris Is Burning "a really bad time in my life", and said the film had only been the first step.

The criticism: whose film is it?

The sharpest critique came from bell hooks, in an essay called Is Paris Burning?, collected in her 1992 book Black Looks: Race and Representation. She described Livingston as a young white filmmaker offering a vision of blackness from the standpoint of whiteness. She argued that the film never questions the whiteness that so many people on screen aspire to, and that the mostly white audiences who loved it were enjoying a spectacle.

Her distinction is worth knowing: "Ritual is that ceremonial act that carries with it meaning and significance beyond what appears, while spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display." For hooks, the balls were ritual for the people inside them, and the film turned them into spectacle for outsiders. She also pointed to Livingston's invisibility on screen, which in her view let viewers forget that someone with a particular standpoint had shaped everything they saw.

Not everyone accepted that reading. In her book Bodies That Matter, the philosopher Judith Butler took issue with treating drag only as misogyny, writing that this analysis treats what she called male-to-female transsexuality, along with cross-dressing and drag, as gay male activities, "which they are not always". That point matters for trans viewers in particular: hooks's essay mostly talks about the people in the film as Black gay men and drag queens, while some of them are described as trans women.

Livingston, looking back in 2020, said hooks had not seen how valuable the film was to queer Black audiences. And people who love the film still question it. Steven Canals, co-creator of the series Pose, has called it an entry-level depiction of ballroom culture, and Wolfgang Busch, who made How Do I Look, has said it exploited the ball community, which was upset with it.

Who got paid

The people in the film had signed standard release forms for WNYC Television when they were filmed, and those releases left them no grounds for a lawsuit. After the film became a success, several of them hired a lawyer in 1991 to seek a share. Paris Dupree, mother of the House of Dupree, had planned to sue for 40 million dollars.

The producers did pay something: about 55,000 dollars, shared among 13 people who appear in the film. Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja were reported to be very happy to be paid for a film they had understood to be unpaid. Others felt it was not enough. Livingston's position at the time was that documentary makers have no obligation to pay their subjects, and that journalistic ethics even argue against it, but that paying them was a matter of respect.

Set against that, the American Film Institute's catalogue records that the film had taken 2.7 million dollars at the box office by late September 1991. Box office is not profit, and clearing the music in the film cost almost as much as shooting and editing it. But the gap is what critics mean when they ask who profited. hooks wrote that treating the film as a favour to the ball community obscured "the substantial rewards she has received for this work." Thirty years on, The A.V. Club summed it up as a film that changed popular culture but not the lives of the people in it.

These are the figures reported at the time and repeated since. We found no full public account of what the film earned in total or how the money was divided.

Its legacy, and ballroom today

The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2016, as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. In 2020 the Criterion Collection released a new 2K restoration, made by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with the Sundance Institute and Outfest, along with more than an hour of outtakes, including footage of Venus at her grandmother's house.

Vogue came first

Madonna's song Vogue came out first: it was released on 20 March 1990, months before the film's premiere. Madonna had seen people voguing at the Sound Factory club in New York, and two voguers from the House of Xtravaganza, Jose Gutierez and Luis Camacho, choreographed the video. Both the song and the film took voguing to people who had never been to a ball, and hooks argued that the same white fascination with voguing had created a market for both.

Pose and Legendary

Pose, which ran on FX from 2018 to 2021, is set in the ballroom world of the late 1980s and 1990s and was heavily inspired by the documentary. It was described as having the largest trans cast ever for a scripted series, with five trans actors in leading roles: Michaela Jaé (MJ) Rodriguez, Indya Moore, Dominique Jackson, Hailie Sahar and Angelica Ross. Livingston worked on it as a consulting producer and directed an episode, and Janet Mock, one of its writers and directors, has said the documentary introduced her to ballroom. For more on screen, see trans and non-binary films and series.

Legendary, a competition series first shown on HBO Max in May 2020, put houses from the ballroom scene into competition across nine balls, with Dashaun Wesley as emcee and a panel of judges that included Leiomy Maldonado.

Ballroom never stopped

The film is sometimes treated as a record of something that ended. Ballroom did not end. It now has scenes across the United States and in countries such as Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom, along with kikis, smaller and more informal competitions. Livingston has pointed out that people from the ball community are now making films and getting deals of their own.

If you are watching Paris Is Burning for the first time, perhaps for LGBTQ+ History Month, it is worth pairing it with the voices that came after: I'm Your Venus, Pose, and hooks's essay. For another part of the story of trans life in New York, see Marsha P. Johnson.