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.