Gay and Transgender Divas Battle for Stardom in Bay Area's Ballroom Scene

Ball participants find discrimination not only from the mainstream, but also in homophobia from black culture itself, which has an interest in policing the image of the community, says Dr. Marlon Bailey, who wrote his dissertation on the ball scene at UC Berkeley and has competed in balls for the House of Prestige as Professor Prestige. "Those that speak for us don't want people to know there's black gay people running around in our community," he says. The scene is often depicted as a superficial pageant for transgender folk and gay men, while its function is ignored: "It has helped to sustain a critical mass of black and Latino community members who otherwise would not have had access to kinship, love, and productive critique ... merely because of their sexuality."

If many of the ball kids have weathered oppression, part of the beauty of a ball is it doesn't show. The recent "Fusion of Time" ball looked like a cherry-picking from area high schools and colleges of the most beautiful and well-dressed young black men — and the majority of the scene is male, with smaller numbers of transgender women, lesbians, and even straight folks joining the scene — with a few Latinos and Asians sprinkled in. Few in the room were over 30. "Everything's gotta be on point," explains China Ultra-Omni, house mother of the Bay Area chapter of the House of Ultra-Omni, a feather ascot at his neck and a pink faux-fur tail hanging from his jeweled belt, displaying a white leather Yves Saint-Laurent sunglass case with no small amount of pride. "This is like casual for me."

While local houses and nonprofits have hosted a number of smaller balls, the Fusion of Time on January 26 marked a coming-out of sorts for the Bay Area on the national circuit. The $5,000 in prizes — donated by private sponsors — was the most cash ever offered on the West Coast, and lured competitors from New York, Chicago, and Atlanta. The event organizers from the Sexual Minority Alliance of Alameda County, known to the ball kids who practice there as the SMAAC Center, had hired legendaries Jack and Kool-Aid Mizrahi, two of the scene's best-known commentators, who bring cachet to wherever they land. This was their first time landing in the Bay Area.

But not all is glamorous at the ball, as the brawl in Atlanta in January attests. Before that, ballroom folks report that a security guard shot a butch queen in Detroit, and someone detonated tear gas at a ball in Washington, D.C. Some describe creative forms of sabotage by the competition: finding powdered glass in their foundation, glue squirted inside their shoes, or grease smeared on the soles. And then there's the stealing: With kids in their late teens and early 20s regularly flying to out-of-state balls, you can bet some airline tickets are bought thanks to credit-card fraud, many in the scene say.

Lifetime Achiever/Pioneer-Icon Kevin Ultra-Omni is one of the few surviving founders from the 1970s, after AIDS ravaged the community in the 1980s. He says the scene has lost some of its shimmer. He regularly posts on a ballroom message board declaring that today's ball kids are mentally ill. "I often wonder for my safety at a ball," he says over the phone from New Jersey. Many in the scene say people get heated in all competitions, and shrug off such rants about today's generation as the ballroom equivalent of saying back in their day, they walked to balls in two feet of snow without stilettos.

"The drama and the histrionics just comes with being young and queer in an urban setting," says New York–based Mizrahi member Roberts. There is "certainly nothing excessive about violence in the scene."

At least at the Fusion of Time ball, the chairs surrounding the house tables were plastic.

Three days before the ball, Starr needed a house. Showing up at the ball alone was a last resort: "Oh, it would bother me to hell," she said. "I just can't do it. To think that you went from mother of a house to 007 in a matter of a week's time span ... does not look good."

After an introduction on MySpace last fall to Overall Father Casanova DaVinci, who'd reopened the then-defunct House of DaVinci in Miami three years ago, Starr was anointed West Coast chapter mother. It was an unusual choice, given that mother status is most often reserved for those with years under their belts who can provide guidance, and Starr had competed in only one major ball. But for Starr, experience was relative. Occasionally, when she was mad at the behavior of her house children, she would claim she had legendary status for the authority effect.