voguing vernaculars

affiliation . practice . aesthetics

In Ballroom culture, nothing begins or ends on time.

—Marlon Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps

Entering the world of the balls is to enter a world where the harsh, soul-breaking realities of oppression are mitigated by the nurturing of dreams and fantasies of splendor.

—Essex Hemphill, “To Be Real”

i.

On TikTok people across genders and races vogue. Sometimes, alone in living rooms. Sometimes in dance studios. Sometimes in balls. On YouTube, dance studios teach voguing. Or incorporate voguing elements into extended routines.

ii.

I am arrested by videos of gay men—they identify themselves as such—voguing. Sometimes the captions read, “butch queen.” Or, “masc in the streets, vogue in the sheets.” Or, “so you think I’m straight.”

Voguing signifies affiliation with femme aesthetics. Sometimes.

Voguing signifies one is vers, not a total top or total bottom. Sometimes.

Voguing signifies that one bottoms. Sometimes.

Voguing signifies that public performances of masculinity are still required in homophobic and transphobic public spaces. Voguing is a different kind of invitation.

Voguing refuses masc4masc discrimination, the common anti-femme violence across many gay circles.

As I watch white gay men vogue in their living rooms, I wonder if these aesthetic performances indicate any affiliation with the Black and Latinx people who inventived voguing. I wonder if this is whitemasc4whitemasc. I wonder if this is yet another practice that white gay men are appropriating—after the style, the slang, the body vernaculars, the dances, the fashion.

iii.

Is all of this too binary?

White v. Nonwhite.

In the rush to push against binaries—a rush endorsed by many white academics—we risk forgetting that binaries are about power relations. Deconstructing grammar is a convenient way to obscure and efface the necessary work of undoing harmful power relations.

Deconstruction can be a meaningful tool. It can also be a way to evade political responsibility.

iv.

Essex Hemphill writes,

Voguing grew out of the gay balls. It is a very expressive dance of hands and limbs and attitude that is best exemplified by the gifted voguer Willi Ninja, Mother of the House of Ninja. The name for the dance is appropriated from Vogue, the infamous fashion bible, because the dance is a stylized imitation and exaggeration of fashion modeling.

On the tv shows that made voguing a contemporary vernacular—Pose and to a lesser extent, Legendary, the connection between voguing and balls is clear. Even though there were whispers that some of the groups assembled on Legendary were simply dance troups that had rebranded to be on the show.

v.

More important than the connection between voguing and balls is that between balls and houses. Balls are staged by and for houses. Again, Essex Hemphill:

Transsexuals, drag queens, gays and sexual transgressives, gender benders, legendary children, up and coming legendary children, mothers and fathers, elders; surrogate families are constructed from this to replace the ones that may no longer exist as a resource, or that may be too dysfunctional to offer any sense of safety, support, or love. Houses of silk and gabardine are built. Houses of dream and fantasy. Houses that bear the names of their legendary founders or that bear the names of fashion designers such as Chanel or Saint Laurent parade and pose at the balls. Houses rise and fall. Legends come and go. To pose is to reach for power while simultaneously holding a real powerlessness at bay.

Pose attempted to think through houses as places of refuge and conflict, support and discipline. Young people—it is frequently young people—with no place to go are offered space to be part of kinship structures and practices. On Pose, there were shared family meals, ordinary domestic chores, and outrageous shenanigans. Financial support. Emotional support. Also harm within families.

vi.

Sometimes a TikTok clip will list a solo performer’s name. And the name announces that the performer belongs to a house. Sometimes, the clip simply shows people voguing alone. Announcing something. Desire? Desire to belong to a house? Desire to be desired? Desire to perform gender differently?

I wonder about those who vogue alone. For the camera. For us. What are they soliciting? What will satisfy them?

I wonder about those who vogue alone. Who do not seem to belong to any houses. What is voguing doing for them?

vii.

If voguing is a vernacular, what kind of vernacular is it?

viii.

According to TikTok, Kenya’s first official ball was held in November this year. Organized by what I think is Kenya’s first official house. A house is not the primary—or only—way queer and trans* people organize their living arrangements. Domestic arrangements are as varied as queer and trans* socialities. To name such an arrangement a house is to embed it within a very particular Black and Latinx North American genealogy.

A politics of affiliation.

That affiliation says something about how certain living arrangements might travel and help to organize and reorganize socialities.

A ball is a declaration. A calling out. A response.

viii.

What are balls when they move from the U.S. to Africa?

From reading Marlon Bailey’s work, I know there are balls in Europe and Asia. A brief skim through TikTok shows balls in Paris, for instance. A house from Paris performed on Legendary.

Because my intellectual interest lies in the relationship between the Black Diaspora and Africa, I ask again, what are balls when they move from the U.S. to Africa?

Move is not the right word.

Marlon Bailey writes,

Ballroom culture is recognized as a global phenomenon instead of being viewed as a phenomenon created by Black and Latino/a LGBT people in the United States that has expanded globally.¹

For the Nairobi ball, a member from a U.S. house was in town to train and prepare participants in voguing. Perhaps more than voguing. But voguing is all I saw on TikTok.

Affiliation. Practice. Aesthetics.

ix.

I could not attend the Nairobi Ball. I was out of town.

Dubbed The Safari Ball, it featured Categories including, Virgin Runway, Virgin Face, Virgin Performance, OTA Runway, OTA Performance, OTA Realness, OTA Sex Siren.²

As I did not attend the Ball, I cannot comment on how participants in Kenya interpreted and translated performances. Realness in Kenya is not the same as Realness in the U.S.: we have different bodily vernaculars, different ways to express and fuck with gender. Cis masculinity in Kenya varies greatly across space. In parts of western Kenya, the bodily vernaculars from central Kenya read as soft. Urban masculinities often read as too soft or too aggressive in rural spaces. Urban femininities are often read as unfeminine in rural spaces.

And while I’m wary of ethnographic gazes in Kenyan spaces—how often we are turned into objects of scrutiny, sites for speculation, data for reports—I would welcome ethonographic accounts of Kenya’s ballroom scene from participants in the scene.

x.

I do not know how many houses there are in Kenya. If that particular social and economic and aesthetic and affective formation has traveled here from the U.S. As elsewhere in the world, queer and trans* Kenyans make social relations and infrastructures that help us survive, dream, love, mourn, live.

xi.

Still, I wonder: What happens when voguing circulates without balls? When voguing circulates as a dance vernacular removed from Black and Latinx communities? When voguing is treated as a gay accessory?

But I cannot give the last word to a speculation about cis white gay men.

So, let me think, for a moment, with Marlon Bailey: “In Ballroom culture, nothing begins or ends on time.”

I have long been fascinated by the untimeliness of Black people’s world making, with how the worlds imagined and made and inhabited by Black people refuse the organization of colonial temporalities: the tick of the work clock, the tock of the whip, the tick of the sale, the tock of the ship, the tick of the coffle, the tock of punishment. Syncopation names one way that Black people move in and through and along and against the brutalities of the clock.

In Ballroom cultures, fantasy extends and reimagines time. A beat. A walk. A stop. A glance. A dip. Something is held. Held up. Held over. Held and held.

There is dreaming. There is living.

Nothing starts or ends on time.

We live.

1. Marlon Bailey, Butch Queen Up in Pumps, 223.

2. Virgin means “people who’ve never walked before.” Or simply beginners in a category. OTA is Open to All, and accepts all people, including all genders (cis, trans*, and nonbinary) and all levels. (From a live featuring Andeti and Destiny Ninja)