Spaces Beyond Ballroom

Abstract

During the 1970s in New York, queer people of color consolidated a queer subculture commonly known as ballroom as a response to spatial and social oppression. At a time when problems such as the spread of AIDS, homelessness, drug abuse, and prostitution were heavily portrayed as inherently related to the queer community, trans people of color were specifically and disproportionately affected by this political climate. In combination with the lack of security they faced in public spaces, this community was forced to use ballrooms to shape their own places of encounter away from the public eye. Drag shows became an escape and a support system through the creation of Houses, intangible structures of kinship, that hosted the grad shows and occasionally provided physical shelter to queer homeless teenagers. However, beyond the hidden ballrooms, part of this community remained in the public eye appropriating parks, piers, and whole streets in unconventional ways. The informality, and often illegality, of these ephemeral spaces resulted in a lack of documentation of the presence of this community in urban and architectural systems and their relation to the city as a whole. Consequently, there is a missing piece in both black and queer history and their relationship to the built environment. This historical research uses the work of queer theorists of the 20th century such as George Chauncey and Laud Humphreys, whose discourse focuses almost exclusively on gay white men, to expand the narrative to transgender women of color. Additionally, with the support of historical photographic material, such as the work of Chantal Regnault and Leonard Fink, it analyzes how this community related to public space and how it shaped discretely the urban uses of Manhattan. It exposes the duality of the queer public space, on one hand, related to the secrecy of ballroom, and on the other, to the public development of queer life. It explains how these two realities existed in the city simultaneously and intertwined.