Tracks, a gay disco in Southeast Washington, is holding a voguing ball the following Sunday, Aug. It opens Friday in 17 cities, including Washington, where it will play exclusively on several screens at the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle.
GAY MEN IN SUITS VIDEOA FULL
It has since broken records in its first commercial run, at New York's Film Forum, where it was booked for two weeks in March and stayed for 17, racking up raves and full houses.Īnd last week, "Paris Is Burning" was picked up for distribution by Prestige, a division of Miramar. The film, which cost about $375,000 to complete, won the 1990 Los Angeles Film Critics' Award for Best Documentary, then shared the prize for Best Documentary at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival (with Barbara Kopple's "American Dream," about labor strife at a Minnesota meatpacking plant). Built around elaborately staged mock fashion balls, this alternative world of black and Latin gay men and lesbians has its own elaborate jargon and its own intricate social structure, the self-protective hierarchy of "houses." These substitute extended families (or "gay street gangs," as one voguer puts it) knock themselves out to imitate a society that, ironically, will not have them. "Paris Is Burning" is a poignant and profound, unsentimental and unexploitative examination of a subculture that until now has been invisible to most Americans. If only Mommy knew where voguing really came from.' "
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"The other day in a drugstore, I overheard a kid say to his mother, 'Mommy, Mommy! Johnny's voguing!' " marvels director Jennie Livingston, in Washington to promote "Paris Is Burning," her first feature film.
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Combining the stiff, haughty poses struck by high-fashion models with acrobatic spins and dips, voguing evolved as a competition from the black gay traditions of "reading" (razor-sharp, fast-slashing, finger-snapping verbal abuse) and "shade" (attitude, the body language version of reading). Voguing: A dance invented by black and Latino gay men in Manhattan's streets, parks and nightclubs, years before Madonna made it famous on MTV.