Defin­ing leg­endary: Paris Is Burn­ing at 30

Pep­per LaBei­ja, shim­mer­ing in her gold­en gown, struts into the Savoy Manor Ball­room to be met with rau­cous applause. Through Paris Is Burn­ing, Jen­nie Livingston’s sem­i­nal chron­i­cle of Harlem’s ball­room scene in the 1980s, we enter a won­der­land of self-expres­sion, where vogue­ing was born and hous­es com­pete by walk­ing run­way cat­e­gories in a bid to become ​‘leg­endary’ – the high­est praise with­in the com­mu­ni­ty. In the 30 years since it pre­miered, few films have come to occu­py such a promi­nent place in queer cinema.

Paris Is Burn­ing earns this stand­ing through its pithy, unvar­nished explo­ration of race, pover­ty and sex­u­al­i­ty. The sto­ries of New York City’s queer Black and His­pan­ic pop­u­lace pre­sent­ed through­out the film are com­pli­cat­ed and hon­est, allow­ing for view­ers to expe­ri­ence a per­son­al and sen­si­tive con­nec­tion to var­i­ous on-screen pres­ences, per­haps for the first time.

This con­nec­tion is as much to do with self-expres­sion as it is with adver­si­ty. The con­strained life prospects for ball­room per­form­ers is appar­ent when, in a space to realise their wildest fan­tasies, par­tic­i­pants walked seem­ing­ly banal run­way cat­e­gories like ​‘schoolgirl/​schoolboy real­ness’ and ​‘exec­u­tive real­ness’. But as drag per­former Dori­an Corey sum­maris­es, ​“You can’t get a job as an exec­u­tive unless you have the edu­ca­tion­al back­ground and the opportunity.”

Soci­ety had stacked the odds against this com­mu­ni­ty. Their skin was too dark; their sex­u­al­i­ty or gen­der iden­ti­ty made them abom­i­na­tions, even to their par­ents. The AIDS epi­dem­ic – which would take the lives of sev­er­al of the film’s sub­jects – was rapid­ly wors­en­ing, its casu­al­ties polit­i­cal­ly aban­doned. As one per­former puts it, this was their ​“social stand­ing in life”: exis­tences des­tined to be for­got­ten. For them, ball­room pres­tige was ​“as close to real­i­ty as we’re gonna get to […] fame and for­tune.” It’s no won­der the title of ​‘leg­endary’ was not tak­en light­ly. This was their chance to be remembered.

The draw of Paris Is Burn­ing goes beyond the buzz of the ball­room. The ball­room com­mu­ni­ty cre­at­ed their own fam­i­ly units – known as Hous­es– that mim­ic­ked the homes many per­form­ers were once cast out of. House moth­ers like Pep­per LaBei­ja and Ang­ie Xtrav­a­gan­za took in ostracised youth, exem­pli­fy­ing the love and sup­port of a cho­sen fam­i­ly. This con­tin­ues to be an immea­sur­ably hope­ful con­cept for those whose lives lack such acceptance.

But not every­one was so lucky to belong to a House. After the balls many went away hun­gry, hav­ing to sleep at the piers. It was a dan­ger­ous world. One of the final moments of the film sees Ang­ie mourn the death of her daugh­ter Venus after she was mur­dered in a hotel room. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, such tragedies con­tin­ue today. Alarm­ing rates of home­less­ness among LGBT+ youth per­sist – the Albert Kennedy Trust found that 24 per cent of home­less young peo­ple in the UK iden­ti­fy as LGBT+. Anti-trans­gen­der vio­lence, par­tic­u­lar­ly against peo­ple of colour, is rife; the Human Rights Cam­paign claimed that the major­i­ty of mur­dered trans­gen­der and gen­der non-con­form­ing peo­ple in the US in 2019 were Black trans­gen­der women.

The mis­treat­ment of queer lives that Paris Is Burn­ing doc­u­ment­ed is also a part of its lega­cy. A 1993 New York Times arti­cle detailed how some of the inter­vie­wees felt cheat­ed when Liv­ingston alleged­ly became rich from the film’s $4 mil­lion domes­tic gross while they had orig­i­nal­ly received noth­ing. Many have also ques­tioned the ethics of Liv­ingston, a white, mid­dle-class woman, telling the sto­ries of a com­mu­ni­ty to which she didn’t belong. This aligns with a wider, ongo­ing dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing the role iden­ti­ty plays in deter­min­ing who has the right and author­i­ty to tell par­tic­u­lar stories.

Despite a com­pli­cat­ed lega­cy, Paris Is Burn­ing con­tin­ues to inspire cre­ativ­i­ty. From mim­ic­k­ing ball­room pro­ceed­ings to the annu­al read­ing chal­lenge, RuPaul’s Drag Race owes much to Paris Is Burn­ing. Fre­quent­ly used catch­phras­es like ​“Why y’all gag­ging so? She bring it to you every ball,” are tes­ta­ment to the film’s lex­i­cal influ­ence on mod­ern queer cul­ture. FX’s Pose – a drama­tised extrap­o­la­tion of Paris – fea­tures the largest cast of trans actress­es of any script­ed show in his­to­ry, while the HBO Max real­i­ty-com­pe­ti­tion series Leg­endary presents a con­tem­po­rary vision of ballroom.

Over the last 30 years, Paris Is Burn­ing has earned the leg­endary sta­tus its sub­jects strived for. The spe­cif­ic inter­sec­tions of dis­crim­i­na­tion in ball­room make for a unique study of soci­ety. And though Liv­ingston was not the first to doc­u­ment sto­ries of race, queer iden­ti­ty and strug­gle in the US, this par­tic­u­lar sto­ry of a sub­cul­ture forced to cel­e­brate itself under­ground is pre­cious to many. This life-affirm­ing doc­u­men­tary is made so by the wis­dom, spir­it and beau­ty of its par­tic­i­pants, their words and sto­ries nev­er ceas­ing to inspire.