How Voguing Became So Popular Worldwide
Article written by Maya Vukovska
Y’all, are you ready to vogue for your lives? Here we go - back to the very origins of this iconic dance that has become a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community.
NYC - the home of the first queer masquerade ball…and much more to come
The year is 1916. The moral reform committee brings to public attention a report about a scandalous behavior they have witnessed - a scene in Hamilton Lodge in Harlem filled with “male perverts” with wigs and in glamorous gowns, looking like women. In other words, the report describes a drag ball - one of the many that have been happening since 1869!
By the 1920s, balls had gained so much public interest that besides queer patrons, they started attracting also straight artists and writers. Harlem became a homosexual Mecca.
Between the 1970s and 1980s, progress was being made for Western LGBTQ+ equality through a series of historical events, some of which were instigated by trans and lesbian women of color. Drag began to take on a new life in the Harlem ballroom scene. Black queens like Crystal LaBeija and Paris Dupree carved space for the trans people of color. In the late 1960s, Crystal LaBeija accused the organizers of the balls of racism and manipulating the vote. That cost her the first prize in the All-American Beauty Contest, but she couldn’t care less and she began holding her own ballroom events.
By the early 1980s, these extravaganzas were transformed from pageantry-style balls to fierce dancing battles. The attendees were welcomed into ‘houses’ and asked to compete in different categories based on performances, costumes, and catwalks.
Voguing comes into vogue
From its very beginning, voguing was a form of battle with an opponent one had to outdo with their poses. The houses competed against one another. Thanks mostly to the TV drama series Pose, now everyone knows that these houses were structured like a family, with a “mother” or a “father” and their “children” the lives of whom were more or less marred by violence and hostility. Ballroom developed also its own language, a big part of which was later appropriated by mainstream media. Besides “voguing,” other popular phrases were “throwing shade”, “werk”, “realness”, “dipping.”
There was an actual event that made voguing the trademark style of the balls.
The most frequented after-hours club in those days was Footsteps on 2nd Avenue and 14th Street. One night, the legendary drag performer Paris Dupree (the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning was named after his annual ball!) was there. At some point during her performance, she got irritated by some black queens bad-mouthing each other, took a Vogue magazine out of her bag, opened it to a page with a posing model, and froze for a moment in the same pose. On the next beat, she turned to another page and struck another pose. This made an immediate effect on the audience. Another queen step forward and did the same in front of Dupree. Paris quickly returned the move, and the two queens went on throwing shade at each other with moves. Soon, the balls were about who was going to stake a better pose. And because it all started with a Vogue magazine, they called the style ‘voguing’.
The kiki generation takes the stage
The AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s hit hard a large population of the ballroom community. The balls and the houses that organized these legendary events became place of activism and awareness. By the 2000s, the activists from the ballroom started working towards creating space for LGBTQ Millennials of color many of which were in great need of home and HIV-prevention services. Soon, a younger generation of voguers were seen taking the stage at smaller kiki balls hosted by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organization. Nowadays, there are a dozen active kiki houses in NYC, and each month they get together to compete in extravagant balls.
Live. Werk. Pose
Post-Madona and post-Paris In Burning, the initial mainstream interest in drag balls died out, and the scene was back to being an underground culture. But now, 30 years later, it is enjoying worldwide attention, and its mainstream visibility has never been bigger thanks to campaigns by Apple and Nike. Drag balls culture has also been featured by artists like Byoncé, FKA Twigs, Mykki Blanco, Ru Paul, Teyana Taylor, and others.
What started as cross-dress extravaganzas in Harlem more than a century ago, is now a global movement tearing down the walls between the generations. And in the context of contemporary gay camp politics, voguing is no more just a dance style. It has taken another role by constantly challenging the traditional understanding of gender.
