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Modern Queer Culture and How Paris Used to Burn

    

     After watching this week's film Paris is Burning I couldn't help but wonder what happened to Ball culture. I tried searching for LGBT balls and Queer balls and all I found were the traditional balls you'd see in ye olden days, talks about ball culture, or Wikipedias page about it. The page claims that ball culture is still a thing, that it even migrated to other countries. I also saw articles claiming ball culture was already "mainstream".  But I never hear any of my queer friends talking about it (many of whom are from NY), I never see people on social media talking about it.

    Maybe modern ball culture is still super far underground?  Maybe I'm too white to be able to actually find it?

Either way, I kept thinking about how the modern world of Queer culture operates. I know that for many high schools (myself included) students in America, clubs like GSA (either the gay-straight alliance or the gender and sexuality alliance depending on who you ask) were the gateway to queer culture and acceptance. But in the wider world, these clubs are treated as "baby's first gay experience". It was something you would eventually grow out of because these clubs tended to attract people who "made their identity their entire personality".

 By the time you got older gay clubs and dating apps were the mainstay, but both are largely treated as very adult and very sexual spaces. Asexuals, sober people, or the vast amount of queer people with drinking problems can't interact with these spaces to the fullest extent they should be able to.

Then there's the internet, countless forums, and social media accounts made to just talk to other people and spread memes about the queer experience. The "bisexual finger guns", the "lesbian speed run", the "pansexuals and their kitchens", "asexuals and cake", "all gay men have the exact same shirt". I'm willing to bet most queer people reading these laughed and nonqueer people were either confused or had an "I got that reference" moment. But these places are almost always full of controversy, gatekeeping, and a constantly changing list of identities and definitions. Everyone has an opinion and more often than not disagreements lead to shouting matches and canceling someone else.

I can't help but be awed at how far the community has come and saddened by how exclusive each of these spaces can be. 

But was Ball culture much different? 

From what I can tell from the movie the whole point was to both celebrate and learn to hide your queerness (very important even today), the commentator and participants made lewd jokes, and it was always late at night early morning. It was a very adult space is what I mean.

Is modern queer culture worse? Better? the same? is it even worth anything to ask these questions?


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