Introduction
-tav nyong'o
By Promise Li and Maggie Mathers, with contributions by Adrienne Adams
Founded in 1992, REACH LA is a Los Angeles based organization aimed at providing HIV/AIDS testing, prevention, education, and treatment targeting youth of color. Throughout the early 1990s, the organization used substance-free dances as locations for community building and learning opportunities for youth. In the early 2000s, REACH began to focus on collaborating with its demographic to produce media and art. Youth involved in their programs wrote, directed, and filmed short videos that were entered into festivals like Fusion (a film festival for LGBT people of color).
In 2006 REACH was granted CDC funding addressed to gay black and Latinx men and men of color who had sex with men as an especially vulnerable demographic. Many of REACH LA’s new community members were involved in the drag/ball scene. REACH saw this subculture as an opportunity to connect with their extended community. In 2006, REACH LA hosted the first Ovahness Ball. Admission was $5, and free HIV testing and counseling were provided. Ovahness has become an annual event and recently hosted its 11th Anniversary Ball. Now, admission is $40, or attendants can get tested for HIV and are admitted for free.
Featured below is a promotional video for the 2015 Ovahness Ball, produced by Gina Lamb, REACH Director of Art and Technology Programs from 1999-2009. It showcases the ball performers as they prepare for the event, giving both outsiders and participants themselves a dramatized glimpse of the "work" behind the scenes of the ball and a fantasy scenario of a professional fashion shoot that the house/ball members themselves framed as an ideal in the 1980s and 90 "vogue" era .
For Professor H. N. Lukes and postdoctoral fellow David Kim's 2016 course, Critical Theory and Social Justice 337, "Cruising the Archive: Queer LA," Occidental College forged an ongoing partnership with REACH LA through the college's Center for Community Based Learning. Early in the semester, our class took a field trip to REACH's South LA headquarters in order to introduce students to analyzing raw collections. Here we sifted through a huge amount of institutional documents, photos, ephemera, and old-format video housed in a makeshift library and a storage room. We left excited and a bit overwhelmed, as REACH itself seems to be in the face of balancing the urgency of its direct HIV-awareness mission and the preservation of its historical materials. As our guide and board member Joe Stewart stated, "“REACH LA has been so busy and overworked since the beginning that it hasn’t had a chance to look back at and document its own history.”
While Lamb's video shows the glamorous aspects of ballroom culture through its "houses," Oxy's CTSJ 337 decided to take a less glamorous and arguably more gritty (or at least grainy/pixelated) approach. Our "archive" section strives to give credit to the taxonomic system of scene's own invention as it continues to produce its own lasting categories. Promise Li and Maggie Mather collected and organized youtube videos taken at balls over the years and linked them by performance category to the program for the 2015 Ovahness Ball. In addition to a structure media gallery of materials we scanned for REACH, Adrienne Adams produced a short documentary film using archival footage and excerpts from the 18 oral histories that they conducted with REACH members.
While engaging hands-on training with both digital tools and analog archives, the course also demanded that we apply archival theory, queer theory, and LGBT* history to our chapter. Here we investigate what an archival engagement with this community organization and subcultural scene might look like through the lens of new technologies like born-digital video footage and Scalar itself. Needless to say, we were chastened by Nyong'o's hermeneutics of "forever guessing," and in keeping, the REACH archive brought its own theoretical questions, which we grapple with in our essays. Professor Lukes worked with Li and Mather's to address theoretical questions about the difference between documentaries, archives, and repertoires framed by the aftermath of Paris is Burning and ongoing questions about archiving and displaying queer of color collections. After the course, Adams went on to intern with REACH, where they continue working today. Adams provides a personal reflection on digging deeper into the REACH LA archive and house/ball community at the end of our chapter.
Ultimately, we want our project to attract funding for REACH to hire professional archivists to catalog and digitize the vast and rich collections documenting 25 years of queer of color life in Los Angeles and the non-profit's unique approach to HIV awareness. It is our hope that this multimedia Scalar presentation will begin the process of looking back, and forward, for this crucial organization, for the communities it serves, and yes, even for the cool hunters.
