The culture of vogue balls introduced to mainstream audiences in “Paris Is Burning” — an antecedent to “Shakedown” — is fundamental to queer culture, Brown said, but it leans male. “There’s nothing that feels like it’s ours,” she said, calling Weinraub’s film an inspiration. “‘Shakedown’ talks about family in a way that I haven’t really seen. You see a scene with one of the dancers and her girlfriend and a kid, too. You see that we exist in this world in all shapes and sizes, and we can own businesses too, and establishments, and create for each other.”

Identity was also intrinsic to the narrative of Hood by Air, the streetwise New York-based fashion line. An openly queer collective led by the designer Shayne Oliver, it played with gender and sought out faces and ethnicities that were otherwise hardly visible on catwalks. Their styles were gothic-industrial and creatively proportioned, and the logo T-shirts they made cost $600. They were a huge hit. (The label disbanded in 2017.)

Weinraub, who had a hand in the designs along with the rest of the group, viewed this period of her life as a utopia, one of a few she has experienced. They were all tightly knit to community, she told me in our conversations via phone and FaceTime. She was holed up in a friend’s photo studio in Los Angeles, where she’d recently relocated from New York, waiting out the coronavirus. Once, we talked while she took an anxiety-quelling walk around the empty streets, rubbing her growing-out buzz cut as she told me her theory of utopias: “These little bubbles have to end, for them to kind of pollinate a bigger culture,” she said. “It feels sad, but it bursts at some point.”

Weinraub grew up in Los Angeles, around Koreatown, not far from the pioneering L.G.B.T. club Jewel’s Catch One that became a part of her orbit. Her father was a pediatrician and her mother, a textile artist, also worked in his office. Her family — her mother was black, her father white and Jewish — viewed themselves as multiracial; Weinraub, one of four siblings, identifies as black, with a Jewish education — for a time, she attended high school in Israel.