Paris Is Burning(1990)
dir. Jennie Livingston
Found family and voguing, before the words existed.
Where to watch: Free on Tubi, PlexLetterboxd ↗
New York's 1980s Black and Latino drag-ball scene — its houses, its mothers, its competitions — documented from deep inside the community over seven years of filming.
Why it’s here
Ballroom culture as chosen family and radical self-invention, from people the world outside had already tried to write off — worth knowing going in that its authorship (a white outsider filmmaker) has been its own real critical conversation since release, one bell hooks and others engaged directly. Watch it alongside that conversation, not instead of it.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Topics
- aids epidemic
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Alexander Chee
Essays on writing, identity, AIDS, and learning to see clearly.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Two Boys Kissing
David Levithan
Two boys break a kissing record. The AIDS generation watches.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
And the Band Played On
Randy Shilts
AIDS was allowed to happen. Shilts spent five years proving it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Anger Is a Gift
Mark Oshiro
The anger you've been told to put down.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Care Work
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Access as radical love. Built by sick disabled queer people of color.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Counting by 7s
Holly Goldberg Sloan
Her parents died. She counts by 7s. She finds her people.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Fake Accounts
Lauren Oyler
Her boyfriend was a conspiracy theorist. Then she became one too.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
The memoir that made the closet visible.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST