Paris is Burning

Fun Fact: This film was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and after filming the producers and Jennie Livingston were sued for not paying their most featured performers. Paris DuPree sued for $40 million! But they all dropped their cases when the attorneys pointed out that they all signed release contracts. Then $55,000 was divided up and paid to 13 of the participants.

So that is kind of a joke and adds to our discussion of unfair treatment.

I decided to Google the film and see what some actual transgender viewers thought of the film and to learn a bit more on Jennie Livingston. I first noticed that it had a 100% rating from Rotten Tomatoes…so that’s impressive!

I then found a blog by a transgender reacting to viewing the film. The post points out that by the time the film became popular, ball culture and vogueing were nearly dead. Many of the same views we discussed in class were mentioned in this post. Misrepresentation was determined a common theme in the film

I found an article were a journalist interviewed Jennie Livingston. The most interesting part of this interview was when the interviewer asked her, “Did you keep going to balls after the film was complete?”

Her response? “I was done.” What does that mean? She thought of it as work and wanted to stop? Or she didn’t really care in the first place, so when the film was over, she was too? I’m not sure how to read into that, but I still found it quite interesting.

In the final post I read through, Huffington Post talked to people of the transgender community. This article described how Paris is Burning was accurate in portraying family and HIV/AIDs in that culture. The article said how the film helped bring attention to the issues surrounding the community.

If you want to read the articles, the links are below. I’m not 100% on my opinion and reading of the film and its representation of the transgender community. That’s probably because I don’t know much about the community in general. Everything I’ve learned has been through films and articles such as these.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/paris-is-burning-ballroom-study-hiv-prevention-in-la_n_1598667.html

http://www.buzzfeed.com/saeedjones/youwannatalkaboutreading

http://transwomantimes.blogspot.com/2012/10/paris-is-burning-document-of-lost.html

How to Fix Paris is Burning

When it came to questioning the motives of the movie, I think I had the same reaction as many of my peers. Before the reading, I simply watched the movie and took in everything as an accurate representation of the life of the transgender community. However, I realized that this is not the case. I think that it is easy to initially just assume that the motives are pure and the information is accurate when someone is portraying ideas about a topic that I am specifically unfamiliar with. Since I do not know much about it, it is easy to be less skeptical and more "gullible" so to speak. But after contemplation, I agree with Bell Hooks that the movie did focus more on the balls with the intention of making the movie more entertaining. However, if an attempt was to be made to draw away from the glamour of the ball, where would the focus turn to? Personally, I wanted more to be said about the angst that this particular subculture experiences with respect to the mainstream culture. I wanted Livingston to delve more into the turmoil that went along with Venus’s death and to talk about the prevalence of such violence. At the same time, if someone were to make a movie and specifically seek out people to interview about these topics, would the film still be accurate? If the director were to focus on the attitudes of the mainstream toward this subculture and vice versa, would that movie still be an accurate representation of the normal life of individuals of the transgender community? I am not entirely sure that by drawing out a specific aspect of the culture, that anyone could get an entirely precise overview of their life as a whole. As a director focusing on a specific aspect that interests them, he or she runs the risk of a biased search for evidence to justify a preformed speculation versus objectively examining evidence and forming an explanation. The fact that I wanted to see more about the disconnect between the two cultures perpetuates the idea that I am searching for a specific evidence to support the idea and not objectively analyzing to see if that idea is even evident. 

Leave It On The Floor

Today in class we talked a lot about how Paris Is Burning was documented from a white, privileged point of view. So, I decided to just Google movies about ball culture to see if there were any other movies that had been made from a different perspective. Another movie came up from 2011 called Leave It on the Floor. I decided to read a few of the reviews and some critics’ views on it. Rotten Tomatoes called it a “mash-up of Paris is Burning, Rent, and Dreamgirls.” I really liked Rent and Dreamgirls, so I thought I would watch Leave It on the Floor since it was on Netflix.

After watching the film, it definitely is a musical in the sense that the music and dancing are more important than the depth of the plot line. The story is about an African American boy who comes out gay to his mother who kicks him out of the house. He finds himself being taken in a by a “house” called Eminence that competes at balls in L.A. There’s a little bit of a love story, but that isn't very important to the film’s overall message about the struggles of gay and transgender youths. One of the most powerful scenes comes after a car accident in which one of the house members dies. At the funeral, the families of the house members attend the funeral. In song, there is a battle between the families and the house members about their life choices and being gay and transgender. The families are referring to all the house members by their male, birth names and the house members are resisting against the families. In the end, the family members admit they don’t want their gay and transgender family members back in their lives which you can tell is really hard for all of them.

In class we commented a little bit on how we would have liked to see a little bit more from other members of the houses rather than just the most prominent contestants of the balls. This film, although it is fiction, gives a little bit better picture of how the houses operate and get prepared for and compete at the balls.

I’m not a huge fan of musicals, so I kind of felt like the film was more happy-go-lucky than the actual problems that it was supposed to be representing. Then again, like one review said, it makes it a little easier to watch if someone is uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the culture than to have the whole film be so serious. Overall it was pretty interesting to watch since it was inspired by Paris Is Burning.

What Would You Change?

This is kind of off topic from what we’ve been talking about recently in class, but we did talk about the female body image earlier this semester and several of us are talking about it in our final projects. Not long ago a fitness trainer named Cassey Ho posted a post-workout picture to Instagram, and she got a lot of negative comments about her body that she was really hurt and upset by. This is what she posted on her Facebook site:

Blogilates

Official page for fitness trainer Cassey Ho

 · Yesterday at 1:52am · 

I'm so happy that many of you clicked over to watch my short film when you saw my new "perfect" body. You experienced the most powerful video I have ever created. You saw me strip down my confidence and self esteem. You saw me raw. Hurt. And vulnerable. For those who haven't seen it yet, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsL7W-GHhJA

I wanted to post again because there was a weird phenomenon that happened when I posted this photoshopped picture. On the very same photo, I got some people praising me and others degrading me.

What worries me is this: 1. That some people think this is real and that it should be "goals." 2. That some people still think it's not good enough.

It's tough knowing what's real and what's not when magazine covers and music videos are photoshopped (yes, music videos), Instagram pics are photoshopped, and so many women are getting surgery. How are we to know what kind of beauty can be naturally achieved when everything around us is so deceiving?

If you want to know what you can do to help stop body shaming, all I ask is that you share the video with at least 1 person. That's all.

After countless days of shooting, weeks of editing, visual effects, and lots of hard work from a team of amazing people, my short film was turned into a reality. Thank you to James Chen, James Jou, and Smashbox for helping me bring this to life. ‪#‎madeatsmashbox

I hope you guys liked it. I love you. Stay beautiful.

The link to the YouTube video should work. I just thought it was interesting to see that even fitness trainers are self-conscious about their bodies. I also have the same worries that she states in her post about going to such extreme lengths to look like an unrealistic photoshopped image on the front of a magazine. 

Paris is Burning

One of the questions on our paper was do we see balls as challenging mainstream, or white may be a better definition, pop cultures or not. I for one believe that it is. I feel like the entire point of the film was to show a section of people's lives that we probably have never seen or heard before. Personally, I had never heard of balls until this film, and while this film was made in 1990, balls could still be going on in the Bronx underground and I would never know it. I feel like something so hidden cannot be mainstream. In my opinion, things done behind closed doors are often seen as challenging the mainstream. Couple this with the fact that they do not consider themselves part the mainstream or the white privileged world, and the balls become a very challenging atmosphere.

It is pretty obvious that the balls take a lot of inspiration from the mainstream pop culture of the day. In the film, we see people idolizing posters of models and hear how many of them just want to be rich and involved in the music industry. The famous people they idolize are often the people they perform as in the ball. This is in addition to the categories of what appears to be white people in various settings, because of the dependence on realness or the ability to successfully fit in or hide within the white mainstream culture.

Despite the fact that they are taking parts of white culture, I feel that the balls clearly challenge mainstream culture. A ton of the film talks about how accepting and tolerant the balls are in a world (or culture) that does not accept them. Sure, they dress up like perhaps mainstream pop culture icons, and they may attempt to look like white men and women, but why are they doing it? Why are they replicating the white mainstream? It is because they don’t fit in, and they are trying to not only create a place of acceptance for themselves, but many of them wish to break into the mainstream world. For a system that often ignores or demeans the LGBT community, even today, the ideas the ball represents definitely challenge the mainstream, which personally I find to be a very great thing.

Let's be Real

In the movie, one man states, “When you’re gay, you monitor everything you do. You monitor how you look, how you dress, how you talk, how you act, did they see me, what do they think of me.” I found myself shaking my head in agreement while the words were coming out of his mouth. Now, I know that I am not an African American, gay man, and I cannot understand the extreme difficulties that group of individuals face on a daily basis, but that statement still struck a cord in me because it completely describes how I feel as I navigate through life, while simultaneously being gay. In a society that presumes you are straight until you “come out”, I personally feel more pressure to hide that part of myself from the rest of the world. Therefore, when I am around people who do not know that I am gay or when I am in public in general, I find myself constantly monitoring everything I do and wondering if they know, and if they know, what do they think of me. As a result, I hold parts of myself back in fear that the truth will somehow come out and a negative consequence will occur. I am very fortunate, as I have never experienced an extremely violent situation associated with coming out; however, I have experienced situations in which I have been verbally degraded by people who were once close to me and even strangers. I have also experienced many times in which people did not know I was gay, and they proceeded to speak hatefully about the gay community right in front of me. It is for these very reasons, that I feel the need to monitor myself, even in a society that has become increasingly more accepting. I am not ashamed of who I am in anyway, and I am not afraid of people knowing that I am gay. In fact, once people know, and I know that they do not care, that anxiety completely disappears. Still, I monitor myself to ensure my own safety because the truth is that I never know how someone is going to react, and in order to live comfortably in society by not facing prejudice on a daily basis, you have to blend in with what is considered to be acceptable.

This is exactly the idea behind “realness”. It is essentially a strategy of survival. As the movie mentioned, those “Femme Realness” queens, who participate in the ball and carry on as women in their real lives, are those who are able to pass or are “able to emerge from a ball and into the subway and arrive home without being bloodied in the process.” On the other hand, you have gay men who, by emulating masculine realness, protect themselves from possible violence by hiding their potential effeminate selves. It is sad, but the realities of not being able to “pass” in society include violence, and even death, especially if you are of color.  I could not even begin to list the number of transgender and gay individuals who have been killed, just for being who they are. These murders are still happening in today’s society (five already this year), along with many other forms of discrimination. Hence, why these balls were so important. They provided the opportunity for these men and women to “be anything you want”, and they did not have to worry about the repercussions of such behaviors while at these balls. It gave them the chance to take that chip on their shoulder off for at least one night. The balls ultimately provided a safe place, and a place where young boys and girls could find “houses” or families after their own families rejected them or find people they could look up to and talk to about the issues they were going through that people who were “not like them” would not understand. The most important thing that the balls did was that they sent the message that being who you are is ok; when society was saying that it was not.  For me, that’s the most beautiful thing.

Paris is Burning and Is Paris Burning

           Although I was reluctant at first about watching Paris is Burning, after reflecting on the movie for a few days I discovered I was actually fascinated and even somewhat interested in the ball culture. Then, after reading chapter nine of the Bell Hooks novel, I found myself thinking about the movie even more. There were two specific parts that were included in both the movie and book that caught my attention.

            First of all, the movie portrays balls in a very positive light. Several of the queens emphasize the importance of having the freedom to “become anything or anyone you want.” Furthermore, they mention that the balls are “not a take-off or a satire,” but are real-life. The queens are able to actually be themselves in a comfortable situation in which they won’t be mocked by white society. The book, too, mentions this aspect. “…identity is always perceived as capable of construction, invention, change” (p. 145). It would appear as though the balls provided homosexual African American men with the opportunity to become themselves and express themselves freely, which was very important for them at the time.

            Another fact I found interesting that was present in the movie and the book is the fame and glamour of the balls. However, the movie praises the glamour and stardom while the book shows a differing opinion. In the movie, the balls are described as putting people close to fame and glamour and allowing the queens to “live the fantasy.” Many of them seem to enjoy this aspect of pageantry in the balls, and numerous scenes display the glamourous queens performing. On the other hand, Bell Hooks notices and does not approve of the pageant-focused tone of the movie. “Much of the film’s focus on pageantry takes the ritual of the black drag ball and makes it spectacle…spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display” (p. 150). This caused me to question the motives of the movie. I initially assumed the movie was depicting an accurate representation of the balls as part of the documentary-like style, but I can also understand where Bell Hooks is coming from. The movie certainly was ‘entertaining dramatic display’ that many people thought was “amazing,” “marvelous,” and “incredibly funny” (p. 149). Did the movie miss its mark, then, as being informative and eye-opening towards the ball culture? Did it instead simply become a pageant-like spectacle that audiences could laugh at?