Paris Is Burning

What is Paris Is Burning about?

Jennie Livingston spent six years filming inside the Black and Latino ball scene of late-1980s New York, and the result is the single most influential queer documentary ever made. The film follows the houses, chosen families headed by a mother or father, and the categories they compete in, from Executive Realness to Butch Queen, where the prize is being read as something the world refuses to let you be. Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Willi Ninja, Octavia St. Laurent and Venus Xtravaganza talk about ambition, money, passing, surgery, and what safety would look like. It is very funny for long stretches and then it is not: the film documents poverty, violence against trans women, and the AIDS crisis without ever turning its subjects into case studies. Almost every phrase you have heard in a club or on Drag Race came out of these rooms, usually without credit or payment, and the film is also a record of that theft in progress. Watch it before you watch anything else on this list.

Every phrase you've heard in a club, every category on Drag Race, every bit of language that got flattened into a meme started in this room. Watch it and you stop treating our culture as decoration.