This week commemorates the 40th anniversary of the legendary Stonewall riots.  Let’s travel back in time for a moment to New York in the 1960’s.  We assume there have always been gay bars, but they didn’t exist as they do now; in the 60’s they were places where police could safely raid and beat patrons with little fear of retaliatory or legal action.  The majority of these bars were owned by the mafia who paid police off to warn barkeepers of impending raids; so most of the time, bars’ patrons could be warned in advance of a raid and pretend they were “straight” until the police left.  In the 60’s raiding gay bars and harassing, beating, mocking, arresting, and stealing from their patrons was commonplace. Not because any laws were being broken, but simply because it was the thing to do.  The Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village was a haven for the patrons that the “respectable” gay community had shunned.  Here, gay runaways, hippies, butch lesbians, transsexuals and drag queens established a camaraderie away from the criticisms and disapproval of not only straight society, but also by gays, who were at that time, striving to assimilate into straight, upper-middle class, white America.  In the early morning of June 28, 1969, the NYPD stormed the Stonewall and began an exceptionally brutal attack on the bar’s patrons.  In a pivotal moment, the crowd decided it was fed up with the ongoing police harassment.  Legend has it that a drag queen snapped and threw the first brick.  The now-famous uprising against the NYPD ensued and lasted for six days, marking the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

Jump ahead 21 years. In Paris Is Burning, Jenny Livingston’s 1990 documentary about Harlem’s ball culture, a group of African American men are walking down the street, explaining to Livingston what it’s like to be poor, gay, and an ethnic minority in America.  You basically have three strikes against you from the get go.  Thus begins Livingston’s foray into the lives of a group of black and Latino gay men, drag queens and transsexuals and the world of drag balls they compete and socialize in.  Through guileless interviews and footage from the balls, we are allowed more than a glimpse into this multi-faceted world where stereotypes about gay men, drag queens and transgendered individuals are constantly challenged.

The world of the ball is as complex as the houses and families these largely ostracized men create.  The pivotal word is “realness,” regardless of the category you walk.  Let me try to explain this succinctly—if you want to belong to a “house” (a self-made family of like-minded individuals with a male “mother” and “father” and usually named after a house of couture like Chanel, Dior, etc.) you have to “walk” a ball (display yourself in all your finery to be judged before an audience of your peers) and bring home a trophy.  If you win enough trophies, you become “legendary.”  House mothers are usually legendary.  The ball is not just a bunch of drag queens elaborately decked out in sequins and feathers, although that is one category.  The categories are myriad and balls can go on all night.  Regardless of category, the goal is to be “real”—could you pass for the real thing out in the real world?  Business executive is a category; school boy is a category; school girl is a category; military is a category.  In the world of the ball you can become what society tells you you cannot be because you are poor, black and gay.

Ousted by their families because of their sexual orientation, each interviewee tells the story of being kicked out of their biological families because of their sexual orientation and their subsequent acceptance into this tightly knit ball society where they’re finally shown unconditional love and acceptance—families come in all shapes, sizes and genders.  Balancing tones of humor, poignancy, sadness and joy, Livingston allows each character to become fully developed over the course of this documentary through her skillful juxtaposition of interview and performance.  By the end of the film we have a deep and affectionate understanding for these fierce outcasts and for the drag balls that offer them a small degree of fame, glory and infamy, if only for one night.  Not all the stories told here end happily, but they ring true.

Jenny Livingston has made a rare documentary with Paris Is Burning.  Themes abound in multiple layers—homophobia, both within and outside of the gay community, racism, gender, class, friendship, ageism, and the construction and dynamics of a family unit.  Her major accomplishment is that she brings to the forefront one segment of the post-Stonewall children and provides complex human dimensions to a group of articulate, intense, and creative men and women who most would choose to objectify.

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