The film became a rallying cry for a wider world of queer expression and a recognition of the struggles of those who existed fearlessly “in the Life.” It has helped to bring about everything from the twenty-first-century rise of LGBTQ balls in Paris, London, Tokyo, and Cape Town to FX’s popular, Emmy Award–winning drama series Pose, which depicts a fictionalized version of the same New York ballroom scene of the eighties and nineties we see in the documentary. Realness is Paris’s manifesto. Watching the exacting performances and outrageous mimicry of the American dream paraded on the ballroom floor, you witness brilliant works of individual survival and urban camouflage.



Paris Is Burning expanded the nonfiction-filmmaking tradition. It is not only a politically astute, historically vital record of lives not typically given such a platform, in a particular place and time, but an embodiment of the axiom that great documentaries must also be good dramas. Like such groundbreaking practitioners of the form as Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, Camille Billops, Barbara Hammer, and Marlon Riggs, Livingston demonstrates a deft ability to broaden the social contexts of observational filmmaking and personal narratives by using engaging performance as documentary evidence.



Livingston’s approach to brin­g­ing Paris Is Burning to fruition was something of an anomaly. A self-described “white, Ivy-educated Jewish kid, born in Texas and raised in LA,” she was, after studying photography and painting at Yale, “driven by a desire to explore filmmaking.” She has described the seven years it took to make Paris Is Burning as “my self-taught graduate school.” Having come of age and come out as a lesbian feminist in the early eighties, she was a photographer who moved to New York in 1985 and became active in ACT UP, the grassroots AIDS awareness and prevention organization that was founded in 1987. Indeed, mid-to-late-eighties New York City, in all its predigital grit, is another tangible presence in the film—an urban landscape that predates the Disneyfication of Forty-Second Street and the gentrification of Harlem.



Absorbed in discovering and documenting the city, Livingston found herself drawn to a cluster of young Black queens voguing and throwing “category” shade among themselves in Washington Square Park. This happenstance led her to the Harlem ball scene and the desire to capture it, her concept enlarging over time from a small photo project to a feature-length documentary. She had the stalwart support of friends, family, mentors, other independent filmmakers, WNYC-TV, and the queer-cinema festival circuit (I first saw the film at New York’s NewFest in June 1990) in making and showing the film, but she then struggled to find distribution. For Livingston, Paris Is Burning became a life’s journey.



The participants in the documentary are impressively diverse: Dorian Corey, a stately diva from the bygone era of Harlem showgirl drag queens, narrates and delivers some of the most insightful and invective sound bites in the film. (“If everybody went to balls and did less drugs, it would be a fun world, wouldn’t it?”) Pepper LaBeija, the fortyish mother of the House of LaBeija, has endured two decades of trends in the illusory world of the Children and remained a marvel of style and attitude. Willi Ninja—one of the success stories of Paris Is Burning, handsome, exceptionally talented and disciplined, ambitious—is a young man who hitches his star to crossover dreams of MTV voguing. Octavia Saint Laurent is a beautiful model who aspires to high fashion and a sex reassignment operation. And then there’s Venus Xtravaganza, a tough but delicate multiracial trans woman whose grisly murder reveals the seamy underworld of the Life—hustling, homelessness, AIDS. In fact, many of the performers shown in the documentary ultimately died of complications from AIDS or poor access to health care.



This cross section of voices and personal stories provides the film’s structure and skillful transitions. What they all have in common is the experience of marginalization—even ostracization—by their families, the Black and Latinx communities, the larger society. Walking the ballroom floor, however, the Children find status, acceptance, and worth. The Harlem ball scene had become a locus of revolutionary acts, where eighties pop culture, mass media, and consumerism were skewered and LGBTQ life was magnified. Take, for example, a scene showing the category Yachting Wear: Ball walkers parody every avaricious detail of the Glamorous Life, replete with jodhpurs and riding crops, endless silk scarves, captain’s hats accessorized with binoculars and sunshades, elaborate sailing regalia, and, of course, crystal flutes of champagne, carried by participants as they execute flawless pirouettes. One statuesque beauty is enfolded in white fur, her Chihuahua in tow wearing pearls.

