Leisure as black survival: ballroom, vogue, and black queer and trans+ embodied activism in Canada

ABSTRACT

Within Canadian leisure spaces anti-Black racism can make survival difficult, not least for those who identify as two-spirit lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and trans+ (QT+). The Black QT+ Ballroom scene in Canada is a leisure practice that began in Toronto within groups of chosen families called ‘houses’ that offer participants a physical and social place of love, comfort, refuge, leisure, physical activity, fashion, dance, music and art. The events that bring these artistic and embodied skills to light are referred to as ‘balls’ in which participants gather to socialize and compete, showcasing their dance skills, runway walking/moving, fiercest outfits, and ability to tap into beautiful parts of their body, gender, sexuality, and race. This article describes Black QT+ ballroom and details how expansive and affirming bodily worlds created in and through ballroom afford true self-expressions and full vibrant lives. We answer the question: why is ballroom important to Black QT+ survival?

Résumé

Dans les espaces de loisirs canadiens, le racisme anti Noirs peut rendre la survie difficile, en particulier pour les personnes qui s’identifient comme bi-esprit lesbiennes, gays, bisexuels, queers et trans+ (QT+). La scène ballroom QT+ noire au Canada est une pratique de loisir qui a vu le jour à Toronto au sein de groupes de familles choisies appelés « maisons » qui offrent aux participants un lieu physique et social d’amour, de confort, de refuge, de loisir, d’activité physique, de mode, de danse, de musique et d’art. Les événements qui mettent en lumière ces compétences artistiques et corporelles sont appelés « bals », au cours desquels les participants se réunissent pour socialiser et concourir, en mettant en avant leurs talents de danseurs, leurs défilés, leurs tenues les plus féroces et leur capacité à mettre en valeur les belles parties de leur corps, de leur genre, de leur sexualité et de leur race. Cet article décrit la ballroom QT+ noire et explique comment les mondes corporels expansifs et affirmatifs créés dans et par la ballroom permettent une véritable expression de soi et des vies pleines de vitalité. Nous répondons à la question : Pourquoi la ballroom est-elle importante pour la survie QT+ noire?

KEYWORDS:

• Queer
• trans
• black
• vogue

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Queer
• trans
• noir
• vogue

Introduction

Within Canadian leisure spaces, racialized people are marginalized and anti-Black racism can make survival difficult, not least for those who identify as two-spirit lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and trans+ (QT+).¹ Black QT+ people face scrutiny and harassment at the intersections of anti-Black racism, sexism transphobia and homophobia and have created their own communities for survival. The ballroom scene, as a grassroots politicized practice, offers what Elkington and Stebbins (2014) refer to as ‘serious leisure’ to affirm Black intersectional identities and increase feelings of safety and security for Black communities. This article describes the Black QT+ ballroom community in Toronto Canada, highlights the varied leisure and physical practices with which ballroom is associated, and details how expansive and affirming bodily worlds created in and through ballroom afford true self-expressions and full vibrant lives. We answer the question: why is ballroom important to Black QT+ survival?

Following Genoe’s (2010, p. 312) suggestion for leisure researchers to ‘seek understanding of leisure in terms of its political nature and whether or not leisure could be used as a space to individually and collectively resist power structures’, this article documents a history of the QT+ ballroom community, while also highlighting the relationship between Canada’s hegemonic myths of multicultural inclusion and lived experiences of intersectional anti-racist resistance in leisure spaces. Multicultural inclusion cannot exist without anti-racist resistance.

Black queer and trans+ exclusion in Canada

QT+ youth in Canada, especially those who are racialized, face several barriers to survival. A report by Trans Pulse Canada (Chih et al., 2020) based on survey data exploring the quality of life from 2,873 trans and non-binary people in Canada describes ‘72% of racialized respondents had experienced verbal harassment in the past 5 years … [and] 73% worried about being stopped or harassed by police or security because of who they are’ (p. 1). Racialized QT+ youth are less likely than their non-racialized peers to express their whole selves (p. 9) meaning they felt a need to minimize disability, make clothing or gender expressions more conventional, or change their language, dialect, or accent to match dominant groups. The performance of race and gender is key to how Black QT+ youth move about in the world; therefore, learning movements and bodily expressions that are affirming and expansive rather than silencing and erasing allows them to be their full selves and to truly live.

A wide range of literatures detail challenges specific to Black QT+ youth in Canada navigating inequitable educational, health and legal systems. The education system does not set Black QT+ youth up for success (McCready, 2004, 2007, 2010). According to a student census conducted between 2011 and 2012, Black QT+ students in the Toronto District School Board reported lower levels of enjoyment, feelings of belonging and experiences of support than all straight and non-racialized LGBTQ students (Yau et al., 2017, p. 2). Similar challenges exist for Black QT+ individuals attempting to access health care resources in a prejudicial Canadian system (Chih et al., 2020; Ferlatte et al., 2020) or to gaining legal assistance to deal with discrimination (James et al., 2018). Because of the ways white supremacy and racism can be intensified in sport spaces – with people who are presumed to be feminine always at risk of sexualized violence, especially in locker rooms – Black QT+ communities can be particularly vulnerable in spaces related to promoting leisure and movement cultures. Greey (2022, p. 14) found that trans people who can ‘leverage white privilege to access locker rooms, despite the denial of their membership there’ can gain a modicum of safety, while Black trans people needed allies to accompany them to improve their locker room experiences. Black QT+ people in Canada created a ballroom community specifically to provide spaces where racialized trans people are able to be celebrated, protected, and affirmed against the backdrop of a society that can be extremely dangerous.

Black QT+ ballroom, houses, and balls

Black QT+ Ballroom (hereafter, ballroom) refers to both ball events and the houses (groups) that organize them. Ballroom as we know it today dates back to the 1920–1930 Drag Circuits in London, England (Houlbrook, 2002), and New York, U.S.A. (Chauncey, 2008). The early masquerade balls involved fashion shows that provided safer space for many QT+ folks to congregate, drink, dance, and present music and movement performances. Few spaces can be deemed completely ‘safe’, that is, free from fear, risk, violence and exclusion for QT+ peoples; however, the conception ‘of “safer spaces” ranges from individual emancipatory acts, through community, neighbourhood, regional, national, and international efforts … to create “counterspaces” where they can find refuge and mutual support from peers’ (Whitzman, 2007, p. 2724). In the early twentieth century, balls were hosted exclusively by white gay men with connections to the hotel and service industries; however, many racialized individuals faced racism and other forms of prejudice in these spaces and broader society (Chauncey, 2008). Though some Black drag queens were allowed to attend and compete in these Balls, they ‘were expected to “whiten up” their faces if they wanted to have a chance of winning the contests. Even then, their chances were slim’ (Lawrence, 2019, p. 3). In 1972, biases, exclusions, and unfair racist treatment in the Harlem Drag Circuits led Crystal LaBeija, a Black trans woman of color and drag queen from New York, to create safer spaces: the first Ballroom House, House of LaBeija, and the first alternative Ballroom competitions for Black and Latinx QT+ folks (Lawrence, 2019). These safer spaces offered a sense of freedom and affirmation of racialized talent and beauty.

Ballroom houses often reference traditional fashion houses (e.g. haute couture designers such as Dior, Chanel) or another quality leaders value and offer ‘family-like structures that are configured socially rather than biologically’ (Bailey, 2013, p. 5). These physical and social spaces were originally configured for groups of Black and racialized QT+ folks to congregate and socialize with their ‘chosen families’, an alternative kinship structure where a house ‘mother’ and/or ‘father’ provide shelter, food, material resources, emotional support, guidance, love, and care for ‘children’ whom they help to advance skills in various ballroom physical culture categories including runway, fashion, dance, and performance categories (Bailey, 2011; Chatzipapatheodoridis, 2017; Lawrence, 2019). The House of Monroe, the first Canadian Ballroom House, founded in Toronto in 2006 by Father Marvel Monroe and Mother Sevyn Prodigy, grew out of a deep necessity for Black QT+ community, leadership, and safety (Bain, 2010; Miyake-Mugler, 2022). Houses became places of refuge for those living at the most vulnerable margins, ‘in need of love and safety, all banding together for strength and acceptance’ (Mohenu, 2018, para 1). ‘Since most of our homes were not a safe place for us to be together, Sevyn offered his place as a haven’ Twysted Miyake-Mugler (2022, para 6) writes. While the emphasis on a house as a space for sleeping, eating, and otherwise living has diminished in contemporary times in Toronto, Canada, houses still operate as a ‘family unit’, offering physical and social spaces that help to address systemic housing and discrimination issues and provide tangible resources and supports youth need to improve their lives, starting with assuring their very survival. Houses are most visible when they compete at balls.

Balls are spaces to ‘showcase their skills, fiercest outfits and ability to tap into parts of their gender and sexuality that were only celebrated in the bustling underground’ (Mohenu, 2018, para. 1). Performances in front of scrupulous judges who are their peers, experts, ballroom leaders and (former) Ballroom champions and legends are not only for trophies. Specific to Ballroom in Detroit, Bailey (2014, p. 491) describes joining ‘kinship and ritualized performance at ball events to create alternative spaces for individual and collective self-fashioning, affirmation, and sociocultural support … to create Black queer space’. People otherwise marginalized by heteronormative and white queer spaces use ballroom houses and performance at balls to create their own connotations, configurations, and conveyances of beauty. Theirs is ‘an alternative discursive terrain and a kinship structure that critiques and revises dominant notions of gender, sexuality, family, and community’ (Bailey, 2011, p. 367; Chatzipapatheodoridis, 2017). Though participants ostensibly compete against each other, they also hold each other up: ‘When the world doesn’t expect anything of you, having people to be accountable to can be a matter of survival’, explains Tamar Miyake-Mugler, a leader of the Toronto ballroom scene (Jankowski, 2020, p. 12). Black and racialized QT+ people emphasize the importance of chosen family and the creation of a liberation-centered leisure space.

Most ball categories were developed out of a need for Black QT+ people to feel seen, affirmed, and celebrated, while some categories have been designed to critique/poke fun at mainstream white-dominant society. There are categories for fashion (Streetwear, Labels, Best Dressed, Runway), Performance (Vogue Femme, Vogue Old Way, Vogue New Way), and categories such as Realness that specifically create space for demonstrating and challenging gender binaries by judging performers’ abilities to pass as cis-gender, as straight, or as an Executive in mainstream society. Johnson (2001, p. 12) details these African American embodied vernacular performances as ‘discourse [used] in subversive ways because it was necessary for our survival’. Every category celebrates the most queer and racialized elements of design, beauty, movement, and being.

Leisure as resistance

Ballroom is a leisure practice that involves ongoing practice and dedication to community and to advancing embodied techniques. Elkington and Stebbins (2014, p. 4) refer to this type of leisure as a ‘serious pursuit … in which participants feel a powerful devotion, or strong, positive attachment, to a form of self-enhancing work’ demonstrating a level of commitment that leads to them ‘acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge and experience’ (see also Stebbins, 2020). Devotees are committed to the opportunities they can create and experience for Black QT+ to be exactly who they want to be without the judgment or social constraints that Abramovich and Shelton (2017) note are often instigated against queer youth by families, unsupportive schools, and invalidating peers. Within the wide range of activities necessary for the organization of successful houses and balls, Black QT+ establish many roles as serious leisure volunteers including devotion to nearly all of Kouri’s (1990) typology of casual and serious volunteers: necessities (food, shelter), economic development, arts, education, health, politics and relationships. Their practices enable them to learn the skills of event organizers, entreprenuers, and influencers. They create and claim their own space, express themselves individually and collectively, and affirm Black subjectivity. Ballroom is inherently a space of serious leisure resistance.

Many leisure researchers have noted how people experiencing various intersectional oppressions can create spaces, roles, and activities that firmly reject dominant discrimination. For example, McKeown and Parry (2019) describe casual leisure spaces such as weddings and holiday family social events that are used by single women to resist sexist ideologies and expectations of heterosexual couplehood, marriage, and biological parenthood. Leisure activities such as playing instruments and storytelling have also been politicized and framed as resistance to ageist and ableist stereotypes for people living with dementia (Genoe, 2010). Single women and persons with dementia are often shut out of activities and roles against their consent; however, through maintenance of communities, friendships, humour and self-advocacy, they can experience empowerment (Genoe, 2010; McKeown & Parry, 2019). Little is known within Leisure Studies, however, about resistance to whiteness through leisure practices. Elkington and Stebbins (2014, p. 43) note a ‘tendency for some people seek their leisure … exclusively in ethnically homogeneous company … [which] may lead in the case of serious leisure (tennis and choral singing) to some significant self-fulfillment’. But the mechanisms of this ‘fulfillment’ have not been extensively explored, nor has the need for ‘ethnically homogeneous company’ in a society intent on marginalizing and eliminating certain bodies. In particular, what deserves attention is the relationship between ethnic/racial groups whose arts and leisure practices may be situated within a celebratory multiculturalism or diversity framework while their lived experience is of terror within white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. In these cases, leisure is not only ‘serious’ in terms of the participants’ commitment level. Leisure is a serious space of survival. As Burdsey (2015) reminds us about Leisure Studies, ‘whiteness has gone habitually unacknowledged and unmarked as a racial identity and structure of power and privilege … the discipline still has some way to travel in its understandings and analyses of the ways that leisure constructs, maintains, reproduces and challenges whiteness’ (p. 385). Belonging to a house and performing in ballroom provides an individual with access to an embodied means of challenging whiteness.

Ballroom as black survival

This paper explores Ballroom participants’ strategies and practices for anti-racist, queer – and trans-affirming, intersectional resistance through serious leisure. Participants create spaces for self-exploration and community connectedness that are keys to Black QT+ liberation and survival through international networking, intergenerational anti-racist learning, physical and artistic skill development, paid and unpaid devotee work, and social status building within a chosen family. Ballroom participants reject and resist the silence around being QT+ and racialized in Canada, and politicize leisure. Three important elements of Black survival in Ballroom highlighted below are the categories of Realness and Performance within the ball structure, and the Community Connectedness available through the house structure itself.

Realness - surviving through (not) passing

Ballroom categories such as Realness relate to Black QT+ survival through resisting or drawing attention to performances of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class that can result in undesired experiences of discrimination and violence, and, alternatively, to joy and hope. Realness is designed for walkers to bring attention to the art of ‘passing’ on the runway.² That is, walkers are judged on their ability to convince audience members of their belonging to a dominant social category and in some cases, to mimic what one is not (Anderson et al., 2020). Competing in Realness allows participants to explore their gender expression and gender identity, while being affirmed for who they are. Baker-Pitts and Martin (2021, p. 207) describe Realness by highlighting the complexities of how participants ‘use chameleon-like subterfuge to enhance or to disguise socially vilified parts of themselves through meticulously designed communal competitions […] protected from transphobic culture’. While Realness remains a popular category, many ballroom organizers acknowledge both that passing is a skill of survival in a world that is dangerous for Black QT+ individuals and that passing is a privilege not everyone holds or wants within the Black QT+ community. Trans activist Janet Mock declared:

Passing comes off as if you’re actively … engaging in some kind of trickery or deception. And so that’s where I get irritated with passing because anytime that I walk on the street, my gender is visible. I am a woman, people see me and take me as a woman. And that is not passing, that is me just being. (Mock, 2014, 0:22)

Some members of the Ballroom community do not believe they have to ‘pass’ or prove who they are, they just simply exist and want to be celebrated for being. Yet others see the embodied critique of gender as part of their role in un-doing gender binaries. Their participation ‘calls into question whether parodying the dominant norms is enough to displace them’, yet walkers accept they are ‘implicated in the very regimes of power’ they oppose (Butler, 2014, p. 125). Through the creation of multiple sub-categories of Realness, the ballroom community judges walkers’ abilities to remain undetected as trans, non-binary, gay or lesbian within a cis-heteronormative society. For example, Transman and Transwoman/Femme Queen Realness, is where walkers compete to ‘pass’ as cis-gender. The Butch Queen category judges a cis-gay man’s ability to be perceived as cis-straight. Butch Realness is based on the ability of a cis-woman to present as masculine and Drag Realness invites performances of bending gender just for the ball from those who live their everyday lives as a cis-identified persons.

Walkers of the Realness category take varying measures not to be ‘spookable’. ‘Spookable is the term used in the Ballroom community to reflect the degree to which a member can aesthetically assimilate in mainstream culture. In other words, is her trans identity detectable?’ Baker-Pitts and Martin (2021, p. 213) ask. To not be detected, walkers change their embodiment including gait, physical gestures, facial expressions, and movements. Passing speaks to a larger issue of being able to blend into the dominant society to increase safety and ‘should not be understood as an attempt at fraud or deceit’ (Anderson et al., 2020, p. 49).

Passing in ballroom allows for exploration, mimicry, and challenging of racialized socio-economic and gender norms. In a more complex way than ‘racial passing’, whereby a lighter skinned person racialized or identified as Black might pass as white and avoid discrimination, Black QT+ people may invoke passing to affirm their Blackness and critique race, class, ability and gender binaries and hierarchies. This is especially pertinent in Canada where both mainstream and QT+ cultures are white-dominated and Black liberation is desperately sought. Passability as rich, uppity, cis-, or hetero- in categories such as Executive Realness or School Boy Realness, gives new meaning to the term survival for Black QT+ members of the Ballroom community. Baker-Pitts and Martin (2021) quote a participant, ‘Dayna, a slight Jamaican woman determined to prevail at the ball’ (p. 210) who “stretched the trans concept saying, ‘You can call me trans-financial: “I’m a middle-class woman born in a poor family”’ (p. 212). This is part of the resistance against mainstream white society that Ballroom encompasses so powerfully. Walkers in categories such as Bangy (woman) Realness or Thug (man) Realness might draw on stereotypes of Black criminality that many Black people reject. However, appearing as a stereotype of a tough individual who can defend themselves against violence may still affirm a raced and gendered idea of self that walkers want to convey or critique though their performance.

Originally explored as a theory of disidentification (Muñoz, 1999), Black QT+ ballroom walkers do not simply mimic, embrace, or reject a cis-hetoronomative society. They also provide a critique of people in positions of power from an outsider’s view and give voice to marginalized communities’ everyday struggles and means of survival. Passing is a survival skill taught amongst Ballroom community members. Walkers of the Realness categories are able to learn how to become less ‘spookable’ with tips and tricks passed from leaders who have experienced their own struggles. Although passing may grant reprieve from social stigma, reprieves have also been shown to be tenuous and revocable while passing can further entrench binaries and stereotypes (Pfeffer, 2014). Nevertheless, successful walking of Realness in a ball can sometimes translate to the difference between life and death for a Black QT person on the street, thereby making embodied serious leisure space an important venue to playfully (and competitively) explore the potential and limits of passing. This community-based intergenerational learning aspect of Ballroom culture is essential for Black QT+ survival.

Performance – vogue as liberation

Another Ballroom category that can be found at the crossroads of art, resistance and survival is Performance in which performers compete through vogue. Vogue is an embodied performance of liberation. The free-form stylized movements of the hands, hips, head, torso, arms and legs represent systematic resistance to the brutality of social, economic, and political contexts that do not value Black life. Liberation, according to decolonial scholar/artist Adolfo Albán Achinte (2013), is achieved through everyday popular artistic practices that emerge from the margins and offer a plurality of alternative options to imagine a re-existence. Vogue performance permits such imagining.

The exact origins of vogue have always been debated, but are located in New York City, ‘the story goes, it started either in the prisons of Riker’s Island, or in the clubs of the West Village – likely a combination of both’ (Street, 2020 para 3). Vogue was created by Black QT+ people to mimic the poses found in Vogue magazines, then evolved into more than just poses.

Over time, the style of voguing changed from the Old Way, which emphasized solid lines, symmetry and sharp angles (static poses that transition from one to another, as if flicking through the pages of Vogue) to the New Way of the late 1980s. The New Way introduced a fluidity and flexibility to voguing, adding moves like the duckwalk (squatting on your heels, kicking your feet as you move forward on the beat), catwalk, spins and dips. (Schijen, 2019, para 4)

These movements changed along with transformations in culture and evolved to embrace queer movement. At its heart vogue provides a platform for out-of-the-box, queer physical expression. Within Black cis-men’s heternormative communities, queer movement is often frowned upon as weak, feminized, and out-of-place. Vogue takes those same movements and turns them into art that is celebrated.

The Performance category of Ballroom provides audiences with opportunities to witness depths of vogue embodiment: movement to music, body contortion, and acrobatics. Performers who battle each other on the runway reach a state of flow common to many dance, sport, art and leisure endeavours. Flow is defined as follows: ‘individuals’ full immersion in their present competitive performance … moderated by the optimization of nine cognitive components: challenge – skills balance, clear goals, the transformation of time, loss of self-consciousness, feedback, concentration, action – awareness merging, control, and autotelic experience’ (Smith et al., 2020, p. 143). However, unlike other movement practices there is a deep spiritual, cultural, and political embodiment of queerness and Blackness related to the flow state found in vogue. ‘Voguing is a unique expression of queer bodies and queer movement, but more importantly it is a unique expression of Black thought and Black resistance’ (Smith et al., 2020, p. 144). Vogue is a liberation practice key to Black survival.

Once performers have learned specific vogue movement skills, individuals are free to combine them in embodied choreography or improvisation, which can feel liberating. Gorgeous Karma Gucci explains, ‘I was never taught how to vogue … I was taught the elements and they left me with that. You can’t teach someone how to vogue. To do it you just have to possess some character or emotion that you want to present to those watching’ (Street, 2020, para 10). Vogue is a personalized way of movement, the voguer tells a story with their body, every movement adds another layer; and then the voguer invites the audience to join them. Pony Zion (De’von Webster) who started the House of Zion and is known as an international Legend in the Performance category explains, ‘To perform, you don’t need to know how to dance. Performance comes from you. Each of us figures out what to create with our masculine and feminine energies. I believe that every soul has its performance’ (Hart & Zion, 2019, para 10). Vogue uses non-verbal body storytelling to convey messages of hope, love, resistance, sorrow, and freedom. Benji Hart (Benji Ninja) another internationally known Ballroom legend, who teaches vogue as a liberatory praxis in Chicago notes, ballroom is more than just ‘fantasy’. ‘Just by being who we are as young Black, Brown, Trans, and Queer people we already exist outside the expectations of identity and movement’ Hart goes on to note that the tactics they engage in – learning to perform, supporting themselves, and creating families – are not recognized as survival strategies by outsiders who aren’t fighting for their own survival ‘To them, Balls are a fantasy world where one can be whoever one wants to be. … [They] do not see us asserting ourselves both on and off the Ballroom runway’ (Hart & Zion, 2019, para. 11). Hart refers to vogue as one of the ‘radical actions’ Black QT+ engage in, situated within Black liberatory praxis.

Vogue performers within ballroom liberate themselves from the confinements of a society that continues to oppress QT+ racialized bodies, with ‘artistic practices rooted in the Black radical aesthetics tradition, and its cultural, political, and theological formulations rooted in a history of the Black struggle for freedom’ (Roberson, 2017, para 14). At the crossroads of runway walking, dance, and theatrical performance, vogue is a unique and deeply liberating practice that shares emotions and symbolic stories of liberation and resistance. The competition relies on loud music and MCing, demands physical stamina and agility, and rewards performances of artistry and athletiecs judged by experts in the community, which may foreclose opportunities for some D/deaf, blind, mad or disabled Black QT+ performers and audience members. However, the intentional inclusion of both sound and visual cues, accessible spaces/stages, and increasingly, sign language interpreters, challenge ablism and demonstrate how Ballroom communities continue the fight for multifaceted Black freedom today. As jazz and hip hop dance before it, vogue captures transnational, cross-fertilized, multiple intersections of Black politics, philosophy, art, music, and aesthetics, refusing Black queer and trans erasure and celebrating survival for all bodies. In contemporary times – what Sadiya Hartman (2007), refers to as the ‘afterlife of slavery’ – Black QT+ performers live with every day terror, dehumanization and judgement based on white cis-gender heterosexual standards. In the vogue performances spaces they create, they operate outside of Eurocentricity and judge for themselves who can best represent Black liberation.

Community – connectivity as vitality

Throughout the Ballroom scene, a main theme that continues to be prevalent is the importance of community connectivity and participation. Frost and Meyer (2012) detail two critical aspects of connectivity in relation to queer and trans communities: connectedness (desire to belong, shared emotional connection) and participation (concrete behaviours, actions within organizations). For many participants, ballroom provides affective and action-oriented spaces that create a sense of solidarity. Connectivity is imperative for the community to thrive through a chosen family network with elders, parents, and siblings all supporting one another, sharing skills and resources, as well as providing a level of protection against pervasive cis-heteronormativity in mainstream society. A study of the psychology of vogue performers suggests ‘aspects of participating in ballroom culture, namely belonging to a house and competing in balls … fulfill social and familial needs related to belonging … [and provide] members with an increased sense of meaning in life’ (Smith et al., 2020, p. 146). This sense of belonging is what makes ballroom imperative to Black survival.

Ballroom creates a home, a space for belonging, and affirmation of identity. House mothers and fathers give their children responsibilities, hold them accountable, and teach them practices of anti-racist, queer- and trans-affirming, intersectional resistance. Many participants come from communities where their queer and/or trans identities are not accepted. ‘Being from a Christian Jamaican home, it’s very hard to live in the skin I’m in’, says Matthew Cuff, also known as Snoopy Lanvin of the House of Lanvin in Toronto. Cuff continued, ‘It wasn’t until I found vogue that I could be genuinely free in my skin and didn’t have to worry about gender boundaries or looking a certain way’ (Jankowski, 2020 para 10). This sentiment is echoed throughout the ballroom scene: a feeling of finally being home, finally having an accepted body, finally not having to change movements or the embodiments of femininity or masculinity. Jazmine Miyake-Mugler is a Canadian trans woman who has found success in ballroom in Toronto and on the global stage. She describes her first-time discovering Ballroom and realizing that this house, chosen family, and community was a space to which she immediately knew she belonged. ‘The experience was almost out of body … can’t even describe it. It was so validating, so reassuring. I was immediately like, “OK. This is where I’m supposed to be. I belong here”’ (Garel, 2020, para 16). Jazmine’s learning of the history of the art form that centers racialized and Black QT+ people and emphasizes presentation of authentic identities was essential for enhancing belonging and translated to creating in-person and online communities, especially during the 2020 racial uprisings in Toronto, Canada. ‘I do feel a responsibility to spread awareness, and to keep in the loop of what’s going on, because that’s a form of community, too’ (Garel, 2020, para 45). Even when houses could not gather in person, Jazmine remained devoted to denouncing racism and celebrating Black lives: ‘The ballroom community is mostly made up of Black queer and trans people, and if I’m not fighting for them when it comes to these things, then I’ve failed the whole community’ (Garel, 2020, para 46). Within houses, formal and informal learning includes the deep legacy of Black history, African diasporas and Black QT+ legends. Vogue instructor, Benji Hart, situates intergenerational Black QT+ knowledge and connections and community as central to his teaching:

A huge part of my practice as a Vogue instructor is setting the expectation that by coming into this tradition you actually make a commitment to a community and specifically make a commitment to the people that are passing this tradition on to you. This is more than learning the steps or being able to recall dates or people’s names. An important value for me is that you can’t, you literally can’t Vogue properly if you don’t hold Black people in regard. (Hart & Zion, 2019, p. 20)

It is this reverence for Black people, Black history, Black joy and Black culture that brings people into Ballroom culture and keeps the intergenerational teachings alive through community connectivity. Following hooks (2014, p. 50) analysis of the ‘education for a critical consciousness’ she received in segregated schools, vogue teachers embodied in their work and their lives ‘a legacy of liberatory pedagogy that demanded active resistance and rebellion against sexism and racism … [Teachers] were active participants in black community, shaping our futures, mapping our intellectual terrains, sharing revolutionary fervor and vision’. hooks goes on to share the learning that ‘any teacher committed to the full self-realization of students was necessarily and fundamentally radical, that ideas were not neutral, that to teach in a way that liberates, that expands consciousness, that awakens, is to challenge domination at its very core’ (hooks, 2014, p. 50). Finding a chosen family for support and learning to perform vogue and other ballroom categories is a means of learning tools of survival, being in community with others enables the embodiment of revolutionary praxis.

Although Black death is enduring, indisputable, and omnipresent (Hartman, 2007; McKenzie & Joseph, 2023), we must remain steadfast in our audacity to find and celebrate Black aliveness, vitality and (extra)ordinary ways of being (Quashie, 2019; Muñoz, 1999). Ballroom in Canada operates as a Black QT+ liberation movement that links Black culture, community, and consciousness. As Joseph (2014, p. 670) has written about cricket, Black leisure spaces in Canada can offer ‘a diasporic form of cultural production, which is essential to (re)developing diasporic communities (real and imagined cultural, kinship, racial, and social groups) and diasporic consciousness (identity and belonging), which span a number of geo-political borders’. These serious leisure spaces teach Black people that there is a place where they belong and can connect with others. There is a place where they can bring their whole selves, and be celebrated for their uniqueness and their ordinariness. Black QT+ folx use their leisure spaces to create communities that are ‘both resistant and subversive strategies to confront oppression and deploy the social imagination as the necessary precursor to long-term liberation work and justice-making’ (Roberson, 2017, para 6). Through ballroom, Black QT+ people learn how to expand their vitality in a world that was never meant for their survival. Vitality is communal.

Conclusion

This paper argues that contemporary ballroom is an extension of the Black Power Movement in Canada. Initiated during the end of the 19th century, the Black Power Movement featured organizations led by local churches, women’s clubs, and chapters of international organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, created by and for Blacks ‘to accommodate their communal needs … to lighten the blow of racial discrimination … and as a way of sustaining themselves socially and spiritually’ (Austin, 2007, p. 516). Many of these associations centred conversations among people of Caribbean, African, United States, British, and other multi-generation Canadian heritages, across classes and genders, to promote ideas of Black liberation, freedom, dignity, self-empowerment and pride in one’s culture. There is little evidence of queer and trans inclusion in these movements and, with the exception of research on the Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes (Joseph & McKenzie, 2023), there is little research on the relationship between leisure spaces, competitive physical cultures, and Canada’s Black freedom-seeking communities.

In Canada, hegemonic myths of multicultural inclusion suggest that all people are welcome in leisure spaces and that specific ethnic/racial groups are encouraged to maintain their heritage through leisure. The reality is that people who are marginalized by the terrors of lived experiences of intersectional racism in a cis-heteronormative society are forced to make their own leisure spaces that resist dominant norms. In their own spaces, their sexuality and gender identities can be affirmed and the beauty and aesthetics of anti-racist resistance can emerge. Within serious leisure, as espoused by Stebbins (2020), it is clear that the motivation to engage in a community that ‘works’ toward social justice through unpaid leisure-based activities often derives from a deep desire to transform the status quo. Members of the ballroom scene in Canada create spaces for joy, affirmation, community care and connection. Most importantly ballroom gives participants the tools to survive, teaching ‘the world about what it means philosophically to be human, what it means politically to struggle for freedom, and what it means theologically to do so in the face of catastrophe and even death’ (Roberson, 2017). The world has a lot to learn from the culture and art practices of ballroom, including ball events and house structures. ‘The central purpose of Black Liberation Research is to move the canon from resistance rhetoric to freedom – focused on practices and policies for Black persons targeted by white violence’ (Stewart & Haynes, 2019, p. 1186). Ballroom focuses on the importance of creative resistance and the ability for an individual to be their full selves in any of the expressive methods they choose. From ‘passing’ in the Realness category to performing embodied freedom through vogue, to creating community connectedness through chosen family, ballroom is liberation through political resistance and embodied freedom.

Ballroom is a practice that was created and built by Black and Latinx folks seeking to be celebrated for their many intersectional identities, while also resisting cis-heteronormative mainstream society. Ballroom insists that within Black diasporic cultures and communities there is space for queerness and diverse gender identities and within QT communities there is space for Blackness. Ballroom has survived underground for decades, and it is a community that must be protected and celebrated for all its riches. Beyond hegemonic definitions of multicultural inclusion in Canada, this paper recognizes the persistent elimination and siliencing of Black QT+ communities and explores inclusion as a concept that requires survival first and foremost. A unique Black diaspora cultural formation, Black QT+ ballroom culture is an example of a leisure space that promotes diverse expressions of race, sexuality, and gender to offer both liberation and resistance as keys to survival.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by [University of Toronto School of Cities Anti-Black Racism/Black Lives] Fund.

Notes on contributors

Janelle Joseph

Janelle Joseph is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and Founder and Director of the IDEAS Research Lab in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education.

Naomi Bain

Naomi Bain is a Program Coordinator with the Toronto Freedom School and a Research Assistant at the University of Toronto

Notes

1. We use ‘+’ here to include all possibilities of gender expressions/identities and sexualities.

2. Individuals competing in the category are referred to as ‘walkers’ and the area they walk as a ‘runway’. These terms, borrowed from the modeling roots of ballroom, have ableist connotations. Participants with varying mobilities and disabilities are welcomed, though there is an able-bodied dominance in ballroom competition.