two knives and cutting each other up, but through a dance form.” Like all art forms, voguing has evolved and progressed over the last three decades, and is still a thriving tradition today. Manchester’s Queer Contact festival, timed to coincide with the first week of LGBT History Month, is this year featuring a vogue battle via video link-up between the UK-based House of Suarez and The House of Ninja in New York. “Paris is Burning” is as exhilaratingly brilliant and hilarious to watch as it is simultaneously heartbreakingly tragic and sad, and no figure better represents this dichotomy than Venus Xtravangza. Venus was a young transgender woman living in and around the ballroom scene, who became a sex worker to save up the necessary money for her surgery. One
of the best sections in the film (in terms of learning new words, learning new insults and just being plain funny) sees Venus ‘reading’. Reading is summed up by Dorian Corey as “the real art form of insult”, finding a flaw and exaggerating it, and anybody who’s ever been at the receiving end of the razor-sharp tongue of a drag queen in a gay bar will know EXACTLY what this is. And then there’s shade, the “more developed form” of reading “Shade is I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you because you know you’re ugly.” Perhaps the thought of insult as an art form seems anachronistic to a society battling against the impact of bullying and anonymous internet trolling, but it’s a fascinating part of the culture of the ballrooms. Towards the end of the film, Venus’s ‘Mother’ Angie reveals
that Venus’s body was found stuffed under a bed in a New York hotel room in 1988, four days after her death – she had been strangled. “But that’s part of life,” Angie remarks, “as far as being a transsexual in New York City and surviving.” It’s a poignant moment, and you realise no matter how much fun was had in the ballroom, no matter how accepted they were amongst their new families, society as a whole still had a lot of catching up to do. Arguably of course, it still does - over the twelve months leading up to November 2012, 265 transgender people were murdered across the world. LGBT History Month might show us that we’ve come a long way, but statistics like that prove there’s still a long way to go. This article was originally published as a shorter feature by Vada Magazine.
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