Brian–Blog post #2
I first saw Paris is Burning a few weeks after 9/11, and the film had a tragic air to it. Though it had been released just eleven years earlier, in 1990, it seemed like a relic from a different era, right from the opening shot of the Twin Towers. The majority of the people who had participated in the documentary, primarily black and Latinx, were already dead then: the first before the film was even completed, murdered and abandoned beneath a dingy hotel bed, and the rest from AIDS-related illnesses. But it also seemed culturally irrelevant as flag-waving, the Patriot Act, and the War on Terror swept the US. It was exactly at this time, in fact, that the most famous drag queen, RuPaul, who I had seen in a recurring role on The Tonight Show, began a two-year sabbatical, knowing that there was little opportunity during such a conservative period.
Continue reading “Paris is Burning, Polari, Drag Race, and the Decades-Long Journey for Queer Slang to Go Mainstream”