Realness With a Twist¹: Gender Creativity in the LGBTQ Ballroom

ABSTRACT

Based on semistructured interviews with 20 transgender people of color who are active in the New York City LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning) ballroom-house culture, this qualitative study explores the subjective need for recognition of transgender realness against the demonstrable threat of exposure, rejection, and gendered violence. Applying a Winnicottian lens, the ballroom is understood as an intermediary space where gender creativity is celebrated and the subjective meaning of realness is unchallenged between the internal psyche and external, transphobic culture. Using D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the “right not to communicate for fear of being infinitely exploited,” this article considers the “joy in hiding and the disaster in not being found” for people of trans experience who are sought out and exposed, yet not truly recognized or protected. In clinical work, a focus on detecting transgender realness shows up as impingements—deflected by the patient’s compliant object-relating—on what Winnicott calls the “personal core,” thwarting genuine communication, psychic growth, and “all the sense of real.” Lessons from the ballroom-house community illuminate the hard-earned quest for recognition against the demand to unmark transgender realness for trans and gender-diverse (TGD) people of color who navigate explicit and micro violations, including the historical violence of erasure.

No Conflict of Interest

Both authors attest that they do not have financial, commercial, legal, or professional relationships with organizations, or with the people working with them, that could influence the research that informed this art icle.

Notes

¹ “Realness with a twist” refers to a category in the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning) ballroom in which gay men or transwomen blend in with straight, cis identities and then break out in vogue, demonstrating their versatility, or, as Bailey (2011) described, “the skill of the competitor to instantly change her/his gender performance from ‘unclockable,’ meaning they unmark themselves as queer, to ‘clockable,’ marking themselves as queer” (p. 379).

² In 2020, The American Medical Association declared the killings of transgender women of color an epidemic.

³ A gay Black man, DM aspired to perform the category of “banji realness,” a ballroom dance form akin to a male model on a runway in Paris but with an urban ghetto persona. His talents for mimicking a tough thug served him well in passing through the precarious streets of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where some of the “house children” with whom he grew up still live; his trans sisters and effeminate brothers did not so easily don the protective shield of machismo.

⁴ In 2017, the same year that National Geographic declared “A Gender Revolution” on its cover, 129 anti-LGBT state bills were introduced to the New York State legislature. In a single week in 2019, the X gender bill that recognizes nonbinary gender was passed in New York and, in a move to undermine progress, the Republican administration threatened to eradicate trans nomenclature, enforcing arbitrary biological tests of chromosomal sex.

⁵ For example, in 2019, voguing battles took center stage on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

⁶ For example, “yazz queen!,” Hillary Clinton exclaimed; “throwing shade,” CNN’s Don Lemon jabbed.

⁷ Among participants in this study, TGD people in the ballroom referred to themselves as “gay” (or as transsexual or as drag queens), an umbrella identity that has persisted, dating to before transgender and gender-nonconforming identities were named and recognized.

⁸ The multigendered relational configurations of kinship outside of compulsory heterosexuality in the ballroom-house community paved the way for DM to envision and create his own family.

⁹ In listening to the colorful storytelling, DM noted the redundancy across narratives, suggesting TGD folklore. These repetitive tales, predictable as they are, convey the importance of resiliency in the face of adversity.

¹⁰ By our second meeting, Sabastian was out as trans and as partner to Ms. Black Trans Princess, with whom he was hoping to become pregnant.

¹¹ Hosted by the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis Committee on Sexualities and Gender Identities, May 10, 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Baker-Pitts

Catherine Baker-Pitts, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., serves on the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis Committee on Sexualities and Gender Identities and is guest faculty at NYU School of Social Work, New Directions Writing Program, and psychoanalytic training institutes. As a Fahs Beck Scholar, she studied body modification; her writing and clinical work focus on gender creativity and body affirmative care.

Darrell Martin

Darrell Martin studied business entrepreneurial studies and the psychology of intersectionality at CUNY and is currently a Founder’s Fellow at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. Owner of Hip Parties, he began his entertainment career in the ballroom scene, and is guest lecturer on the topic at Princeton University, New York University, and Hunter College.