3.
Paris Is Burning
(1990)
Depicting the underground drag-ball culture of New York City in the late 1980s, Jennie Livingston's documentary, which she began shooting while in New York City for a summer course, has since influenced the queer community and academia in ways she may never have anticipated. Livingston spent seven years attending the balls and interviewing many prominent members of the houses, including Pepper LaBeija. The film details not only the elaborate house balls but the houses themselves as alternative families and is full of deft observations about race, sexuality, gender, poverty and the AIDS epidemic.
Much of the slang we use today comes from drag culture, and this film shows drag queens using these terms as industry jargon almost two decades before mainstream culture began to appropriate them.
Film critic Emanuel Levy wrote that the film shows how black cultural expression is co-opted and diluted for mass consumption and that the movie, which was released out after Madonna's iconic "Vogue" video but was produced before her video's release, shows how much these queer people of color were exploited. "It also reiterated the failure of mainstream culture to even acknowledge the creative black genius it eagerly exploited," he wrote.
The shade of it all.
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