This Time article explores the significance of ballroom culture, particularly voguing, within the context of Black and brown transgender and gender-nonconforming communities. These communities have historically faced discrimination, violence, housing insecurity, and high HIV infection rates. 

Ballroom culture has emerged as a self-sustaining social network and creative collective that offers a space for empowerment, artistic expression, and community building. The ballroom scene originated during the Harlem Renaissance as a response to efforts by the Black church to remove LGBTQ residents from the neighborhood. Rather than being cast out, ballroom culture centered its participants in an empowered performance space, incorporating fashion, pageantry, dance, and chosen families known as “houses”. It rejected both white supremacy and Black homophobia, spreading across the U.S. alongside the Black Freedom Movement. 

Voguing, a key element of ballroom culture, traces its origins to incarcerated trans and queer individuals at Rikers Island prison in the late 1970s. It served as a form of entertainment and a means to envision freedom while in captivity, transcending gender, borders, and state violence. The article emphasizes that ballroom culture continues to be a vital tool for self-expression and resistance. It connects to contemporary social justice movements, such as calls to defund the police, decriminalize sex work, and address the parallel pandemics of HIV and COVID. Ballroom culture offers hope and radical inclusivity, reflecting what democracy could be in a time of racial reckoning, a global pandemic, and political unrest.

In summary, ballroom culture, particularly voguing, represents a resilient and transformative force for Black and brown transgender and gender-nonconforming communities, offering a platform for self-expression, activism, and the envisioning of new worlds. It highlights the importance of celebrating and supporting these communities in their struggles for freedom and equality.