imdb | letterboxd
Directed by Jennie Livingston
“When you’re gay, you monitor everything you do. How you dress, how you talk, how you act. ‘Do they see me? What do they think of me?’”
I had been thinking about how mainstream audiences want minorities to define themselves through suffering, and that canonized queer art often abides by cis-heteronormative frameworks because our own cinematic vocabulary is alienating to them. But queer people are not defined by pain. On the contrary, speaking as a transgender girl, my gender identity stems from euphoria and my suffering is the result of claustrophobic expectations of what cis people think I should be.
Jennie Livingston separates Paris Is Burning from non-queer presence almost entirely and thus largely severs from a definition of pain. The documentary lets queer people speak and live without vying for acceptance from a world that has long discarded them; they create their own domain to safely challenge gender, sexuality, and other cultural conventions through fashion and dance. Livingston captures through queer dialogue and humor why that space is so important: it’s the only place wherein we receive unconditional support for our expression.
As queer people do every day, Paris Is Burning has to engage with the ‘real’ world’s standards and queer people’s subsequent trauma in our participation. We’re forced into a world whose people and government reject us, revile us, kill us, and expect us to define ourselves by that when we have our own aspirations and dreams. Seeing these happy and hopeful faces talk about getting sexual reassignment surgery, becoming a model, or gaining wealth to support young runaways makes it so much more difficult to reconcile their premature deaths. Dorian Corey and Angie Xtravaganza died from the Reagan administration’s racist and homophobic treatment of the aids epidemic, while Venus Xtravaganza was strangled during sex work. We get punished no matter how hard we try to conform to non-queer societal expectations.
In spite of this permeating trauma and rage, Paris Is Burning celebrates a late-80s New York subculture where queer people could exist, dream, and express. Countless people light the canvas on fire with their outfits and vogues, bring trophies to their home, and embrace each other. In the final minutes there’s a brief scene of a girl who recently had sexual reassignment surgery, beaming with joy as the sun radiates behind her and her friend on the beach. Livingston does not create these compositions. Instead, she utilizes queer people’s environments, fashion, and faces for photographs of dreamers becoming the superstars. Paris Is Burning is and forever will be important because for 77 minutes it reminds us we’re not defined by our hardships, that we’ve always existed and will continue to do so, and that we’re the most beautiful people in the world.
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