The History of Ballroom Culture

Image Credit: QSS via Wikimedia Commons

Literature and Drama Editor Laura Kiely delves into the rich and influential history of Ballroom Culture, charting its emergence in the 1880s to the present day.

What happens to a subculture when it’s mainstreamed into pop culture? How does this affect lesser-known creators when a form of artistic expression unique to them becomes directly associated with a household name? The year 1990 exhibited a pivotal moment for Ballroom culture’s catapult out of Harlem and rise to widespread fame. 

In March of 1990, Madonna’s smash hit ‘Vogue’ and its subsequent music video was released to widespread acclaim, and Jennie Livingston’s documentary film Paris Is Burning was released the following September; both to eager audiences. Madonna’s ‘Vogue’, directed by  then novice David Fincher, showcases numerous attributes of Ballroom performance art, specifically, the highly stylised dance of Voguing. Although the music video features Ballroom-legendary House of Xtravaganza members Luis Camacho and Jose Guiterez performing in the dance sequences, the video downplays the core influences of its stylistic framing. In the lyrics, the rap in the song’s bridge lists several old Hollywood stars, from Monroe to Dean, and their many counterparts. In this way, Madonna establishes something more akin to a thesis on old, romantic, and specifically white Hollywood glam, rather than on the Black Queer communities from which Ballroom culture originally sprang. 

The practice of Ballroom as a subculture began over a century before the year 1990. Drag finds its genesis in a formerly enslaved African-American man named William Dorsey Swann in the late 1880s. Swann began hosting secret balls known as drags, perhaps deriving from the antiquated term “grand rag” once used to denote masquerade balls. At Swann’s gatherings, guests donned women’s clothing or men’s suits and danced to folk music. There were many arrests made on Swann and guests during this time, however, the primordial drag queens persevered and continued to host the Balls that would become the subculture as we know it today. Historian Kathleen Casey, author of The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville (2015) argues that “Drag is about race, class and sexuality as much as it is about gender. If we focus exclusively on only one of these intersections, we fail to see how drag performances are layered across time and space and can have multiple meanings for different audiences.” 

From its inception in the late 19th century, Ballroom evolved over the decades into a safe space for Queer people of colour to freely express themselves without excessive harassment from outside heteronormative society. By the 1930s onwards, Ballroom thrived in Harlem, New York, where it also became a place of refuge for LGBTQ children who had fled unaccepting and abusive homes. One of Ballroom’s most colossal figures was Pepper LaBeija, a drag queen who fostered a nurturing, motherly surrogate for those who sought refuge in her House of LaBeija. In Livingston’s film, LaBeija emphasises how “Those balls are more or less like our fantasies of being a superstar, like the Oscars or being on the runway as a model. A lot of those kids that are in the balls don’t have two of nothing; some of them don’t even eat.” 

The Houses that emerged out of Ballroom culture, such as the renowned Houses of Xtravaganza or LaBeija, were crucial in providing vulnerable young Queer people of colour with an environment in which they could both live and safely express their true characters. To understand why the Balls were so important is to understand how dire the social climate was in the 1980s for Queer people, specifically Queer people of colour.

In 2024, we can see how much Ballroom culture’s roots have impacted Queer nightlife spaces by firstly providing a safe space for queer people of colour. Queer nightlife began with Ballroom over a century ago, and its influences are still heavily apparent today, not just in fashion and aesthetics, but in its celebration of marginalised identities through authentic community-building that fosters solidarity for those who face systemic oppression.