Above is the trailer for the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning (released August 1991) that introduced the world to New York’s drag ball culture taking place at the intersection of Black, Latino, gay, and trans cultures and against the backdrop of growing panic and awareness about the HIV/AIDS crisis. The film has since been criticized by a number of people in and outside of academia, and I’ve embedded two examples below: the seminal critique by bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, and the article “Paris is Burning: How Society’s Stratification Systems Make Drag Queens of Us All.”
How does Paris is Burning relate to the topic of inequality and its role in shaping the future of New York? In his book There Goes the Gayborhood, Amin Ghaziani analyzes changes in populations in seminal “gayborhoods” like the West Village in New York. While the Brooklyn College Library doesn’t have a copy of Ghaziani’s book, it is available to borrow from a number of other CUNY libraries. An excerpt from a review in The New Yorker:
Ghaziani argues that the rise of post-gay culture has introduced a new turmoil in gay neighborhoods: more gay men and women are leaving for suburbs and smaller cities, and more straight people are moving in. According to the “index of dissimilarity,” which demographers use to measure the spatial segregation of minority groups, census data show that both male and female same-sex households became “less segregated and less spatially isolated across the United States from 2000 to 2010,” Ghaziani writes. Same-sex couples reported living in ninety-three per cent of all counties in the United States in 2010, prompting Ghaziani to conclude that, “gays, in other words, really are everywhere.” Ghaziani doesn’t think that this has wiped gayborhoods off the map—hence the question mark in his book’s title. But he documents a transformation that mimics that of earlier immigrant enclaves, triggered largely, he says, by the acceptance of gay men and women in the mainstream.
As the review notes, Ghaziani’s book uses Chicago as his case study rather than San Francisco or New York. Perhaps your research could explore the topic of inequality in New York by looking at the data of queer populations in New York – looking at the historic “gayborhoods” – and looking for changes in income, queer populations, and/or minority populations using the online tool Social Explorer. What kind of impact does Ghaziani’s argument have on populations like the people documented in Paris is Burning? What kind of information does the census data reveal and what kinds of trends might the data predict? Have demographic and neighborhood changes mean that Paris is Burning couldn’t be filmed in New York’s future?
