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How dated are these concerns of appropriation? With regard to the actual film, the answer is, apparently, not at all, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the twenty-fifth anniversary screening of Paris at the “Celebrate Brooklyn” LGBT* Pride event in 2015. Initially, no one from the house/ball scene was consulted or invited. An ensuing Internet storm lead to a number of performers canceling, a re-adjudication of Livingston’s initial exploitation, and an eventual attempt to make amends with a staging of a House United ball.[1] In a Bully Bloggers posting called "After the Ball," Tavia Nyong’o argues that this incident demonstrates how paradoxical attitudes toward queer of color life persist: on the one hand, the house members were once again sidelined, their legends presumed to be dead, and their actual thriving community relegated to a kind of social death by nostalgic embrace of the film’s anniversary. On the other hand, the rectification of throwing the ball in conjunction with the screening called for a command performance that Nyong’o links to José Muñoz’s idea of a particular queer of color “burden of liveness,” which Nyong’o defines as the condition where “queers of color are expected to perform liveness and vitality under conditions of temporary visibility that erase our histories and futures.”[2]  

If many of the concerns that vexed Paris is Burning’s initial reception still haunt actual queer of color lives, the status of the film has nonetheless changed through the sheer force of time. Nyong’o writes that “rather than standing in for ball culture – an unfair expectation of any single film, no matter how amazing — the film could be understood as part of queer history, and specifically part of the ball culture’s history, and even part of its futurity as well.”[3] More productive than making a metonymic critique of the film’s failures to represent the multiple facets of ballroom culture (a culture that is, in its very nature, multifaceted and elusive), Nyong’o highlights the ability of the film to showcase the authenticity and contradiction that are inherent to ballroom culture. While there are certainly complex, and even problematic elements at play with Paris is Burning, the film cannot be disregarded for the overall awareness it raised about the black queer demographic that makes up the ballroom community. The film is spectacle, but so is the art form it showcases.

The legacy of Paris is Burning in the academic discourse and popular culture reminds us that the medium is not, in fact, always equivalent to the message. Nyong’o points out that the historical position of the film, and the critiques that followed it, contrasts with today’s born-digital age. The increased proliferation of smart phone produced media, viral videos, “webcams and reality TV” have resulted in an increased tactic of “broadcasting our daily lives in a potential revenue stream, if only we make that life interesting/outrageous/abject enough.” Where Harper and others once focused on the material condition of the ball-goers lives and Livingston’s means of production, Nyong’o notes that a culture of ego-casting fueled by new media not only disrupts the divide between the documentarian and her subject but also renders “performance […] almost a default setting for everyone.” As Nyong'o points out, "Octavia St. Laurent’s and Venus Xtravaganza’s expectations of celebrity, that once seemed tinged with pathos, now seem like viable career ambitions. Dorian Corey’s world-wise wisdom about the illusions of fame seem to come from a vanished queer world now lost in the glare of mass media visibility."[4] 



Questions of cultural appropriation have recently been renewed, as evidenced by the controversy over Miley Cyrus’s appropriation of the African American dance style “twerking” at the 2013 MTV Music Video Awards. Yet these age-old issues of racial appropriation that Eric Lott famously framed as an ambivalent interracial relation of “love and theft” significantly change with technological advances.[5] It is ironic that the same summer of the Brooklyn Pride controversy saw the debut of Tangerine (2015), a day-in-the-life narrative feature about black trans sex workers, based largely on the experiences of its main amateur actresses.[6] One wonders whether this movie was not similarly accused of cultural appropriation because audiences and critics were stunned that its white cis-male director Sean Baker shot it entirely on an iPhone for one-fifth of Livingston’s budget. The smashup of heightened technophilia and social justice enthusiasm for the “trans tipping point” of the last few years may account for Tangerine’s free pass, but we would note that the burden of queer of color “liveness” is still at play with this movie. Tangerine’s trailer shows how the grit and grain of the cell phone format recovers some glamour by “goin’ hard” with performance and soundtrack.

Nyong’o notes that “Vogueing and walking on the Celebrate Brooklyn stage – welcome as it was --does nothing to transform the real conditions of poverty, racism, and transphobia,” which continue to plague members of the ballroom scene.[7] Paris is Burning arguably catalyzed not just queer theory but the materialist articulations of what is now recognized as “queer of color critique.” Indeed, Muñoz’s foundational text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics pointedly pivots toward the documentary The Salt Mines (1990) with its “starker and less glamorous” rendering of black and Latinx trans life in New York as an “antidote” to the sensational ethos of Paris.[8] These are perhaps surprising moves coming from performance studies scholars like Nyong’o and Muñoz. The point of queer of color critique, however, has always been to measure the real conditions of the past, present, and future with the performances and fantasy worlds that make for livable lives. As Roderick Ferguson states, “Since historical materialism has traditionally privileged class over other relations, queer of color critique cannot take it up without revision, must not employ it without disidentification.”[9] Moving forward, queer of color critique might take up questions of how the materiality of digitally mediated lives will affect not just fleshly embodiments but emergent methodologies of critique.
 

We argue that REACH LA disrupts this discussion by the mere fact of introducing both artistic and material job and health resources into today’s ball scene in Los Angeles. Addressing the real conditions that black and Latinx queer folk face on a daily basis is intimately linked to fostering creative control in the community. We are reminded here of Diana Taylor’s foundational performance studies work on the distinction between the archive and the repertoire. “As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning.”[10] While resisting any simplistic dichotomy, Taylor notes that the archive/repertoire distinction tends to align with a colonizer/colonized division. Documentary craft like Livingston’s purports to preserve the repertoire of the ball for a lasting queer archive. Yet even these divisions dissolve in the context of an organization like REACH LA, which hosts balls, teaches vogue and walking classes, provides material services for HIV prevention, and has inadvertently accumulated a rich archive. Taylor issues a pessimistic view of how the digital era will be effected by the embodied knowledge system of the repertoire: “Now, on the brink of the digital revolution that both utilizes and threatens to displace writing, the body again seems poised to disappear in a virtual space that eludes embodiment.”[11] We, by contrast, think that the analog and digital collaborations embodied by the world of REACH suggest new choreographies of meaning.


Our project reframes Nyong'o's challenge to "cool hunters" confronting the open secret of vogue performance by asking what queer digital archiving of an organization like REACH LA might mean. Whereas queer theory has traditionally staked its claim in polemical critiques of normativity, queer of color analysis, according to scholar Amy Villarejo, “takes the prismatic pressures of the normative as impossible to seize and to systematize simultaneously.”[12] With regard to archival practices, this chapter of The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA Subculture seeks to positively channel some of this impossibility of simultaneous seizure and systemization. We seize REACH’s collections and present them here to speak for themselves. We respect the LA ball scene’s own systemization by displaying its repertoire by linking ball programs to video of actual performances. Paris is Burning should be seen as part of this archive and repertoire. The urgency of the early years of HIV/AIDS and the rapid popularization of queer culture in the 1990s no doubt commanded much of the critique that film provoked. As Jesse Green wrote in The New York Times, “Paris is no longer burning. It has burned. And not only because of the casualties. No one needs to go to a ball to see drag anymore […] No one needs to go to a ball to see voguing either, not since Madonna gobbled it up, appropriating two Xtravaganzas in the process.”[13] We, by contrast, see Paris as ovah.[14]
 
[1] Tavia Nyong’o, “After the Ball,” https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/07/08/after-the-ball/.
[2] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[3] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[4] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[5] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[6] This information comes from an interview with actress Mya Taylor at Occidental College, March 16, 2017. When asked about Tangerine’s cultural appropriation and the legacy of Paris is Burning, she refused the terms of engagement with campy consternation.
[7] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[8] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 162.
[9] Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 4.
[10] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 20.
[11] Taylor, Archive and Repetoire, 16.
[12] Amy Villarejo, “Tarrying With the Normative: Queer Theory and Black History,” Social Text Vol.23, Nos.3&4 (Fall/Winter 2005): 69-84, 70.
[13] Jesse Green, “Paris has Burned,” New York Times, April 8, 1993.
[14] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ovah

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