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To the right of Yasha LaBeija was her first-ever official ballroom competitor, a seasoned House of West leader dressed in a striped blue and purple athletic jersey with a black soccer ball tucked underneath her left arm. Yasha stood surrounded by almost two hundred ballroom spectators, scattered with other members of the Royal House of LaBeija eager to witness Yasha’s debut in her first-ever competitive category: open to all (OTA) realness. Directly in front of Yasha were her biggest critics yet – the panel of seven ballroom judges who would evaluate her on a scale of 1-10 and could even give her the “chop,” cutting her from competing in the next round of that category.
For her debut, this category called all female figures to “bring it as varsity athletes.” Yasha was dressed in a bright white Aritzia leotard with gymnastics chalk covering the palm of her hands. She took one step forward, and all she could hear was the crowd ferociously chanting, “LaBeija! LaBeija! LaBeija!” After she completed her walk, Yasha elegantly turned around and looked ahead of her once again, sign after sign jolted into the air: 10s, 10s across the board.
While the inception of ball culture dates back to the 1960s, a new younger generation of ballroom, including Yasha, remains alive and well. Despite several elements of the prolific culture permeating mainstream media, the younger generation of ballroom continues to be drawn to it in the same way their predecessors were: a love and pursuit of queer community.
In March 2023, at the Ballroom Throwbacks TV Awards Ball, thrown by the Haus of Alpha Omega at Knockdown Center in Queens, 22-year-old Yasha debuted in her first-ever ballroom category and took home the grand prize for “female figure realness.” She had joined the House of LaBeija almost a year before that after one of the House leaders, Jeffrey, “but we all refer to him lovingly as Kitty LaBeija,” recruited her from a chance encounter at a LaBeija Fourth of July barbecue event in 2022.
Yasha, who remembers watching the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, at 14, told Teen Vogue she had “been interested in ballroom before, but never really found a space or a house within it that [she] felt valued [her] contributions the way that they needed to be valued.”
The documentary follows the New York City ballroom scene from the mid to late 80s, shining a spotlight on Pepper LaBeija, the House mother at the time and successor to Crystal LaBeija, the House of LaBeija’s first-ever House mother.
“What a mother in ballroom does is guide her kids and navigate their paths towards success, whether it's their education, career, or financial stability,” Samil LaBeija tells me. Samil is the current House mother of the New York City chapter of the House of LaBeija. “To me, a mother is a figure who you would look up to, but also someone you can look to during life’s challenges. Mothers are looked up to because we help pave the way for our kids, opening doors many never thought possible.”
Samil is the sixth mother of the New York City House of LaBeija in a line of mothers following Crystal LaBeija who founded the House in 1968. Samil is the first NYC chapter mother, while those before her in NYC were mothers of the overall House. The current overall mother is Vivian LaBeija Crystal and Lottie LaBeija are credited as the founders of Black queer ballroom culture after Crystal, who had established an impressive reputation in the ‘60s Manhattan drag circuit as “Crystal LaAsia,” decided she was tired of being overlooked in the drag pageant scene because of her age and race. She realized that the judges typically awarded top titles to lighter-skinned, typically white women. With Lottie by her side, the two presented the “House of LaBeija Ball” at Up the Downstairs Case in Harlem, New York, and thus, ballroom was born.
Over the half of a century since the inception of ballroom in Harlem, the influence of its culture has reached all corners of the world, including mainstream television, music and fashion. In 1990, Madonna released her no. 1 single, “Vogue,” which was a love letter to the Black queer ballroom community that welcomed her when she moved to New York City. The cultural phenomenon RuPaul’s Drag Race is structured with direct inspiration from ballroom culture, including elements like “chopping,” “throwing shade,” “reading,” runway categories, balls and more.
The latest influence of ballroom culture can be seen in Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning album Renaissance where she actually names the House of LaBeija in her song, “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix),” in the third verse and draws inspiration from the culture as a whole in almost all of her other songs on the album. Beyoncé’s critically acclaimed Renaissance World Tour also features a solo vogue performance from Honey Balenciaga. One of “the dolls” touring with Beyoncé internationally, Honey received her start in ballroom as a member of the House of LaBeija in 2017.
That said, how has ballroom’s impact on the most prominent areas of popular culture affected today’s standing underground ballroom competitions and community-focused Houses?
House Mother Samil certainly enjoys seeing her children and members of her community make major headway into the realms of pop culture. Still, she doesn’t think shows like “Legendary” or “Pose” capture the full breadth of true ballroom. She admires the representation, but for her, the defining elements of ballroom culture remain off-screen.
“Most of television depicts a different story of what ballroom is,” Samil says. “You got to get into the shade of the ballroom, the judges panel, the culture of each house. Yes, the balls last 12 hours – and sometimes more. You’re not seeing that on TV.”
“I think it's really good that we’re as public as we are now because we've been underground for ages. We’re still low-key in many ways, but it's only right that people get to know what happened at five or six in the morning. While everybody was either sleeping or just waking up, our people were having balls. To go from that to being on TV, I feel like the whole world is admiring us,” Samil continued.
But, 25-year-old House of LaBeija member Stephan LaBeija doesn’t see the rise of ballroom culture in the modern day as mere coincidence. On the helm of 491 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in the country's legislatures just this year, he sees ballroom to continue to live on as a form of political resistance.
“When you look at the political climate and the patterns of when the light gets shown on ballroom, it’s often during politically unfavorable moments for the community,” Stephan says. “The first ballrooms rose to prominence during the Reagan years and on the backdrop of the HIV epidemic, [then] during ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and we’re now back in a perilous time with don’t say gay laws, bans on transitioning and queer books. I’m not seeing a resurgence in ballroom specifically because ballroom has always been here, but a resurgence of interest in our culture. It’s seen as a form of resistance to all this strife.”
While witnessing the major rise of ballroom culture in mainstream media, Stephan also sees important misconceptions about the art form continue to be espoused. It’s “not just vogueing,” he emphasized, “It’s so much more.” The House of LaBeija members pointed out to me that the heart of ballroom culture is family, and that will never make its way to television or music, or fashion.
“We say mother for a reason,” Samil explains. “My house really are my children.”
The week before Yasha’s debut at the Alpha Omega Ball in March, Kitty took her shoe shopping. They spent hours running around different stores in New York City, searching for the perfect pair she could wear to her debut. At the last store they went to, they settled on a pair of Michael Kors pumps, ironically the same pair they rejected at the first store they went to. After making the purchase, Kitty brought Yasha back to the House and the two prepared a full Southern barbecue, a nostalgic ode to the Georgia roots Yasha moved away from to come to New York City. The two shared a special dinner together unlike anything Yasha had ever experienced before.
“It was just me and Kitty, the leader that brought me into the house and who is my gay mother now,” Yasha explains. “At that moment, I was thinking about how incredible it is to have that kind of relationship with an elder who invests his time, energy and attention to me because it's not something I've ever received before. A lot of times, that’s the ballroom that you don’t see. That’s the ballroom that I really love.”
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