Making Change: A House of Our Own

I remember sitting on the Christopher Street piers one Friday evening in 1999, the last summer they were open. A Latino youth--about 15 years old, his straight black hair cut into a bob and tucked just under his ears--darted through the West Side Highway traffic to make his entrance at the pier. He was still toting a book bag from school, from which he pulled a new pair of black chunky-heel pumps, gleefully showing them off to his companion. Trying them on, he got up and worked the concrete strip of land as if it were a runway during Fashion Week in Paris.

A crowd of a dozen or so youth formed a circle and egged him on. Someone brought out a boom box, and a “battle” ensued as young dancers--male and female, butch and femme--jumped into the circle to challenge each other’s “vogue” and “stunt” skills. (“Vogueing” is a dance involving highly stylized movements and poses, the name suggesting models on a fashion runway. “Stunts” are more advanced forms of vogueing, which showcase a dancer’s strength and flexibility.)

After 10 minutes or so, the battle ended and everyone went their separate ways--off to Uptown, Bed-Stuy, and the other black and Latino neighborhoods that most of the queer youth hanging out at the piers called home.

In a city where cultures are defined as much by the place they claim as the identities they represent, the young people I watched that night were essentially refugees--pushed from the gay community by racism and edged out of black and Latino communities by homophobia and transphobia. Queer people of color throughout New York City share their landless status. Revealing episodes like the scene at Chelsea’s View Bar last September--when dozens of people of color successfully shut down a blackface drag performance of “Shirley Q. Liquor,” which was to open to a sold-out house that night--drive us from largely white, mainstream gay spaces. But if we retreat to black and Latino neighborhoods, we are greeted with what is at best indifference. Last January, when a black gay man was shot in Harlem in an apparent bias crime, most of Harlem’s black organizations responded with silence.

Community-building activists have typically addressed this problem by carving out space for queer people of color within largely white gay worlds. But the organizers of a circuit of drag balls, popular among the young people who once staked a claim at the Christopher Street piers, have begun showing us a new way. Once primarily heads of social clubs, these event planners are becoming full-fledged community organizers who are creating new safe spaces for their members in the neighborhoods they call home.

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The ballroom community revolves around collectives called “houses,” which have familial structures headed by “mothers” and “fathers”--a designation that is not based on biology. The houses offer members a network of friends and, when needed, a place to turn for informal support services. But their most prominent role is to organize balls, at which the houses compete for cash prizes in performance art battles like those staged on the Christopher Street piers.

“I worked on Wall Street for over 15 years,” says Kevin Omni, “Legendary Father” of the House of Omni, in describing his house’s eclectic mix--and challenging what he sees as a popular misconception that the ball scene’s members are “depressed, starved and everything else.”

“The current Father of the House is a schoolteacher and a minister,” he adds. “All of our members are educated, articulate and creative people. The Balls were and are our creative outlet.”