It was just as Rihanna had warned us: brands wanted to score themselves points for being inclusive, without really improving inclusivity. Or worse, they tried to be inclusive, and got it wrong. While some brands like Burberry or Adidas created LGBTQ+-inspired clothing lines in order to give the money to LGBTQ+ charities, others did the same without giving back or standing by the values they were claiming to promote. L’Oréal asked the British activist and model Munroe Bergdorf to be the first ever trans woman in one of its major beauty campaigns, only to drop her when she posted comments on Facebook after the Charlottesville rally in August 2017 in which she explained that all white people are conditioned to be racist (she was talking about structural racism). L’Oréal wanted Munroe, but a palatable, censored version of her.
The token use of LGBTQ+ people in brand campaigns gave me the same feeling as seeing a Hollywood film about gay or trans lives starring straight or cisgender actors. I remember watching Transamerica with my mum when it came out in 2005, a film that cast a cis woman as a trans woman. Then there was Dallas Buyers Club, with Jared Leto playing a trans woman trying to get hold of AZT drugs to treat her HIV. And The Danish Girl, in which Eddie Redmayne played Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo gender confirmation surgery, sustaining complications that eventually killed her. The problem with these films is that there aren’t enough gay or trans actors visible at the top of the media to begin with, so for roles about their lives to be taken by straight or cis actors seems to be unnecessarily perpetuating a disparity. There are a lot of LGBTQ+ actors out there. Plus, you know, it’s just annoying to see someone try on a marginal identity that they have no experience of for a role, and then later take it off and throw it away.
If all of this frustrated me, there were other people it frustrated more. As Meredith had said, in terms of cultural production, no group of people had contributed more to culture and had its efforts co-opted and pillaged more often than queer people of colour. If tokenism was using an individual to look inclusive, then appropriation was stealing the cultural signifiers of a community of people for profit, and giving absolutely nothing back. I thought of one of the people I’d had the most honest and insightful conversations about this with before, and remembered that she lived in New York.
I had been a fan of Kia LaBeija’s art for a while. Kia’s identity, like Meredith’s, comprised a lot of marginalized intersections: she was queer, black, female and born HIV positive. She was a photographer, a dancer and an activist. I discovered her work online via Visual AIDS, an organization that archived art by people who lived with HIV or died from AIDS-related illness, and provided a platform for HIV positive artists to upload their own work, whatever the medium, and receive grants or become involved in art shows and panel discussions. In her early twenties, Kia uploaded a self-portrait, which was immediately selected for one of Visual AIDS’s shows. It was called ‘In My Room’, an image of her sitting in her bedroom in red lingerie. In another image from the same series, she stretched her body out across a balcony above New York, in a beautiful red dress, channelling one of her first and only HIV positive role models, Rosario Dawson’s character Mimi from the film Rent. Like all of her photos, they captured the various, intricate sides of her character, as well as the stories she had to tell, but they also highlighted how politicized her body was. In each shot, she reinvented herself with costume, lighting and poses, creating a catalogue of glamorous, cinematic images, where she sometimes appeared powerful, and other times vulnerable.
‘For me, my work is about releasing trauma out of your body, through movement,’ Kia said, when I interviewed her over Skype in 2016. ‘I’ve endured a lot of physical and emotional pain that I’ve pushed down. I have all these experiences I’ve never dealt with and now they’re manifesting in my photos.’ As well as trauma, a lot of Kia’s work focused on memory. One of her photos pictured her lying on the floor of her bedroom with an image of her mother in a frame. Another was titled ‘Eleven’, after the day it was taken: the eleventh anniversary of her mother’s death. Looking like a film still, it was a photo of her wearing a red prom dress and holding a rose corsage in her doctor’s office, the same doctor’s office she’d been going to since she was four years old to get her meds.
‘As a child born with HIV, I wasn’t expected to make it as far as my high school prom,’ she said. ‘I was born in 1990, and medication that put you on a regimen that was expected to save your life didn’t come around until like 1996, so people weren’t sure babies with HIV of my age would survive.’
Kia described her mother, Kwan Bennett, as ‘in the 1 per cent of people living with HIV, because she was a woman, heterosexual and Filipino Native American’. Bennett was an activist herself; ‘She was a survivor of rape and incest when she was a child and HIV was one more thing added onto her plate of very traumatic things,’ explained Kia. ‘She wanted to cope with it so she got involved with different organizations, such as Apicha – an organization for Asian Pacific Islanders, particularly with HIV. She wanted to spread the message that Asian people can contract HIV too.’ Bennett passed away in 2004 and Kia picked up where she left off. Tackling AIDS and representation through her art and her activism helped to assuage the feeling of loneliness her status gave her, especially given that her mother wasn’t around and that she felt she couldn’t tell anyone at school she was HIV positive, due to the stigma attached to the virus.
After growing up feeling like this, Kia found community when she started to vogue around nine years ago while training as a dancer. Later, when she was working at a big nightclub in New York City called Webster Hall, she met someone in a voguing group called The House of LaBeija, which she proudly took up as her last name. ‘A house is a family and the family walks under a name that is chosen by the founder of the house,’ she told me. ‘A lot of houses are named after actual fashion houses like Dior or Chanel or Saint Laurent. These house families compete in balls – underground competitions where queer people enter into different categories: performance categories like “voguing”, fashion categories like “best dressed”, or “realness” categories like “butch realness” or “femme realness”, where you have to try to pass as a heterosexual man or woman.’ She would train with her house once a week and go to clubs and practise. ‘That’s how you learn – you learn all the elements and go out and make them your own when you compete.’
A lot of people date the emergence of ballroom culture back to Paris Is Burning, the 1990 Jennie Livingston documentary that captured the culture on film, but historians have found evidence of African American drag queens in Washington DC as far back as 1888, and The House of LaBeija is over forty years old. According to Kia, LaBeija was the first ever voguing ‘house’ and still one of the most famous in the world. It was founded by Crystal LaBeija, who appeared in the 1968 documentary The Queen. An African American drag queen, Crystal was competing in a pageant against white drag queens and felt it was because of the colour of her skin that she did not win. ‘She made a fuss about it and someone close to her suggested she host her own function under the name of LaBeija,’ said Kia. ‘So she did. She was the first one to create the blueprint for ballroom culture, and slowly new performance categories have been added.’
After Crystal, someone called Pepper LaBeija became the mother of the house, but when Pepper died, the house became a little inactive because she was the leader; ‘She was the star, the icon, the glue that held everything together,’ said Kia, who was recently asked by the fathers of the house if she’d take on the role. She’d been winning lots of voguing competitions, being very vocal in terms of her activism, as well as very present within the community – all criteria of a house mother. Practically speaking, being mother meant organizing balls and meet-ups, and being there for members of the house when they were in need. For Kia, taking a more active role in the house was more than just a job. ‘When we get together it is beautiful, it’s a political statement,’ she said. ‘There’s so much love, so much art and so much accept
ance.’
When Meredith mentioned Madonna’s ‘Vogue’, she was talking about how Madonna had turned it into a worldwide phenomenon by writing the song and voguing her way through the video. As folklore had it, Madonna first saw voguing at the New York Love Ball, a fundraiser for AIDS. She asked Willi Ninja, a voguing expert, to teach her how to do it, and then put Jose and Luis from the House of Xtravaganza in her video. She had, in other words, taken something subcultural, repackaged it for the mainstream and profited from it. A similar argument was made against Paris Is Burning: Livingston, a white lesbian film-maker, was accused of profiteering off ballroom culture since she didn’t pay the participants in the film. Others defended her, by suggesting her status as a genderqueer woman gave her a stake in queer communities more generally, that documentary film-makers don’t usually pay their subjects, or by pointing out that she’d spent seven whole years working on the film, which didn’t sound like someone trying to make a quick buck.
The point was, it wasn’t only straight people who could appropriate. RuPaul had come under criticism for making money from a culture that he didn’t have a whole lot to do with any more. Drag was heavily indebted to ballroom, and what we saw on Drag Race – particularly the runway section at the end of the show – was a lot like a glitzy televised version of what took place in Harlem ballrooms in the 1980s. This threw up a lot of difficult, perhaps unanswerable questions: Is there really a polarity between ‘OK’ and ‘not OK’ when it comes to appropriation, or are the lines more blurred? Can you call out the appropriation of ballroom or drag culture if you’ve never contributed to the production of it yourself?
For someone like Kia, the result of the historic interest in ball culture was complicated: the enduring popularity of voguing meant that not just artists or film-makers but brands too wanted a piece of it. There was an opportunity for her to make money, but at what cost? The same went for her art as an HIV positive, queer woman of colour. While showing work at the Whitney and the Studio Museum in Harlem was good for her career, the interviews she was asked to do sometimes felt bittersweet – her identity turned into hashtags for intersectional clickbait. ‘Sometimes I think this association will follow me for the rest of my life,’ she told me. ‘Sometimes you wonder, “Would they be as interested in my work if I was not living with HIV?”’
In this sense, she embodied a lot of what Meredith was talking about: she was living at the site of conflict between inclusion and tokenism; she had experienced first-hand what it was like to have your culture appropriated; and she was exasperated by it, as I found out when I finally went to meet her at her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that week.
Over tea, Kia told me about the work she’d been doing recently: namely, more work for brands, like a ‘Voguing Tour of New York’ for Airbnb. When this type of work came to her, she had to ask herself why she was being asked, and whether she was being reimbursed properly. ‘People really try it,’ she told me, visibly tired. ‘They lowball you and assume you’re not on top of your game, or make assumptions that because of who you are you might not understand how things work. For me, because I’ve been working so much lately, I’m like, “You’re not gonna put nothing past me, I know what I’m worth!”’
Kia also thought a lot about the fact that every time she was asked to do a job, someone lower down the food chain didn’t get paid; sometimes she even turned down work because of it. ‘I have a particular story, experience, relationship with vogue culture, for example, but it’s not the only one. Sometimes I’m asked to be part of things and I say, “I know you want to involve me but maybe you should involve someone else whose experience is a little bit closer to what you’re looking for.” At the end of the day, ballroom is majority male-driven and trans-driven.’ She told me that, because she’d been doing this work, tokenism and cultural appropriation had been on her mind more than ever before, particularly the question of why black queer culture was so often appropriated and what that meant.
‘It’s hard, right? Cause diversity is so in right now,’ she said, emphasizing the last part sardonically.
‘It gets fucking annoying. You see something and you’re like, OK, I see myself, but you’ll be like, they’re really trying it though, they’re doing it because everyone is doing it. Being culturally diverse is in vogue, being black is in vogue.’ Literally. Weeks before we’d met, British Vogue had a much-needed overhaul, with white Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Shulman stepping down for Ghanaian-born Edward Enninful, who promised to drastically diversify the magazine. More generally, a seismic shift seemed to be happening, where those who were once treated as marginal were suddenly embraced as beautiful. Kia was talking, inadvertently, about all of it – the rise of trans models, the launch of them., even DragCon. What I wanted to know was when she thought this movement became problematic. It took her about thirty seconds to think of some examples.
‘When Pepsi did that Black Lives Matter commercial,’ she said, referring to the trivializing advert where Kendall Jenner handed a Pepsi to a riot cop as an olive branch during what appears to be a civil rights protest, a nod to recent police clashes with Black Lives Matter protesters in America. ‘It’s like, are you doing that cause you really wanna include people,’ continued Kia, ‘or cause it’s the hype right now, and you don’t wanna get backlash for not doing that?’
She carried on: ‘Oh, and I hate seeing the word “slay” everywhere! It drives me up the fucking wall. Oh God, stop with slay and werk. I see it everywhere! I was looking at something on Instagram today. Maybe Maybelline or CoverGirl – one of those brands – they had this Instagram ad. First of all the make-up looks terrible, it was like thin winged cat eyeliner, and then it comes in and you fill it in’ – I started laughing at her scathing description – ‘and then they’re like, “catch the shade” or “get shady”. I’m like, Noooo, stop will you already! Just stop.’
I thought about a pair of pants I had seen in H&M that said ‘Slay’ on the bum and shivered. I told Kia about them. ‘I think some people are buying them with no irony, and I say that as a white person.’
The trouble with these words, I knew, was that they had somehow wound their way from African American communities through the LGBTQ+ culture of Harlem’s ballrooms, via Paris Is Burning, the Internet, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Beyoncé and Broad City, into the popular consciousness. The first use of ‘yass’ – the word everyone was shouting at the RuPaul’s Drag Race viewing parties – had been traced back as far as 1893, but now Instagram had stickers you could add to your photos that said ‘yass’. I had seen online that the frequent use of the word ‘banjee’ on Drag Race even had teenage girls using it (it’s a street term from the eighties, used by queer black and Latino communities to describe masc gay boys who look tough, later evolving into a more general byword for ‘ghetto’). Quite often, I’d hear a white gay man or a straight female friend of my own using words like ‘werk’ and ‘fierce’. Had I misguidedly used them once or twice? Probably. I knew what these words meant because they were everywhere – you couldn’t escape them – but I asked Kia to explain their meaning anyway.
‘To “read” somebody is pretty much to tell somebody about themselves,’ she said, not as impatiently as I had expected. ‘When you’re reading it’s like you’re giving somebody an inside look and you do it with “shade” – in a way that’s not necessarily nice. And you can read and read and read and read as long as you want to, but sometimes it can be a back-and-forth situation. A read can also be playful. It can be nasty and serious but it can also be funny. And “werk” is a praise,’ she continued. ‘When you see somebody doing something sick, you’re like, “Werk – that shit is hot.” Giving somebody props for something that they’re doing. It’s all about the way that you use the word as well: “Werk bitch, killed it, nailed it, you are excellent.”’ She said it with conviction, to show me how it was done. But by the time we came on to the word ‘yass’ – an affirmation, a version of ‘yes’, an encouragement – she gave up, letting out a sigh
.
‘The thing about these words is, they sound so crazy when you explain them, but queer people of colour created this vernacular because they’ve grown up around a mother, sister and aunts who have a certain vernacular. The inspiration comes from women of colour, specifically black women. Queer men of colour have recreated it in a way that’s super playful and fits into their community, but they’re words heard in the home growing up.’
‘How does it make you feel when you hear other people using it?’
‘The vernacular is used by white queer men in a way that to me feels offensive. Like now you’re just mocking a black woman, not using it with black femme power the way that black queer men are using it,’ Kia weighed in. ‘White queer men using it feels offensive given the history of violence against black women. White queer men use it with a sense of entitlement. If I say, “Excuse me, you sound nuts, these words belong to my people and you can’t just use them in a way that’s nasty and offensive,” they’d be like, “Oh, I can do whatever the fuck I want.”’
‘But it’s not just white queer men. I feel like this language goes from black women to queer black men to white queer men to white teenage girls to everybody else,’ I said.
Kia shook her head disbelievingly. ‘Why would teenage white girls want to use this language?’ she said, sounding genuinely confused. ‘Black culture is appropriated by mass media so fast. I see this language all over the place, and the inflection and the way people say it sounds . . . ugh . . .’ She trailed off and gathered her thoughts. ‘When you’re used to people speaking with this kind of language and you hear it you’re like, oh’ – she snapped her fingers – ‘you feel it’s true, you know? But then you hear it and you feel it’s dishonest. People have the right intentions – “you slayed that” – but the way it’s being said, it doesn’t really come from you, it doesn’t make sense in your vernacular.’
Queer Intentions Page 19
