Paris Is Burning: Why This 35-Year-Old Film is Still Vitaly Important
A leather-jacketed man with mullet and mustache stands on a filthy New York street in 1989. He says to the camera, “It’s like passing through the looking-glass. Wonderland. You go in there and you feel a hundred per cent right.”
There are few films, documentaries especially, that both illuminate and indict with such ferocity, such baroque flamboyance and such bracing realism, as Paris Is Burning. Released in 1990, Jennie Livingston’s exploration of New York’s drag ball scene, and its many transgender participants, was not merely a portrait of marginalized communities. It was, and remains, a searing X-ray of American empire, refracted through the cracked mirrors of race, class, gender, and sexuality. That it still provokes 35 years later is proof of its enduring flame, and our continued proximity to the same cold winds of hypocrisy.
Let us begin with the obvious: Paris Is Burning is not comfortable viewing. Nor should it be. What Livingston gave us, however unintentionally, was a chronicle of a counterculture that did not ask for inclusion but demanded visibility. Not through the politesse of assimilation, but through the riotous theatre of drag, of “realness,” of voguing; a stylised explosion of limbs which, like jazz or the blues, was born of pain and alchemised into beauty. It is a strangely melancholic viewing experience. The lives depicted were in the gutter or somewhere close by. As the AIDS crisis raged on, the film’s subjects were, in the words of Alan Moore: “…so close to being recognized as fully human, were turned into medieval bogeyman. A human tragedy thus licensed human bigotry.”
The Houses of LaBeija, Xtravaganza, Ninja, and others were not merely “performers.” They were resistance fighters in sequins. They understood, far better than the average political consultant or Oxbridge sociologist, the machinery of American aspiration. They knew that race and gender were performances because they had to perform them daily, for survival. Their critiques were not theoretical but lived, danced, lip-synched in church basements under leaking ceilings.
There is an astonishing clarity to their speech. Consider Dorian Corey, delivering lines that could outlive most of today’s TED Talks: “In real life, you can’t get a job as an executive unless you have the educational background and the opportunity. But when you’re voguing, you are telling the audience: I am that executive.” It is, in a way, the most devastating condemnation of the American meritocracy myth, and it comes not from the editorial pages of The New York Times, but from someone sewing feathered gowns on a bedroom floor.
A certain strain of critic has accused Livingston, a white lesbian filmmaker, of “exploiting” her subjects for her own gain. Livingston’s lens, however fraught, gave platform to voices no one else bothered to hear. If your concern is ownership over amplification, you’ve mistaken the terrain for the map.
What Paris Is Burning showed us was not simply a subculture, but an entire allegory of America: its promises, its poisons, its pageantry. This was capitalism as drag, gender as drag, whiteness as drag, masculinity as drag. It revealed the hollowness of “realness” in a society where performance is the reality, where the line between identity and illusion is so blurred, it might as well be glitter, precipitating the avatar-led age of Social Media.
And here we are, 35 years on. RuPaul is a global brand. Drag is commodified, packaged, tweeted. Everyone from Target to Citibank hoists the rainbow flag in June with the trembling enthusiasm of those terrified to appear behind the curve. But underneath the pink-slicked surface, the same structural inequalities persist; the same erasures, the same violences, the same children kicked out of homes for not fitting into binaries invented by people who think “normal” is an immovable moral category. And now, thanks to the nightmarish philistines on Pennsylvania Avenue, those same pinkwashing corporations yield to the same pressures that made this movie essential watching in the first place.
Paris Is Burning survives not as a relic but as a reckoning. It does not flatter its audience. It does not offer catharsis. It dares to ask a nation founded on masks what happens when the mask becomes the only face you’re allowed to show. And it answers not with pity, nor propaganda, but with raw power. So, raise your glass, preferably something cheap, to the queens, outcasts, and exiles who understood the real battle is not just to exist but to be seen. And if you can do it in heels, under an ancient disco ball, so much the better.
You can watch Paris is Burning on YouTube right here.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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