‘We are the new mecca’: can New York’s underground ballroom scene survive the hype?

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As the ballroom community attracts mainstream attention – and influence – many within the scene view the growing popularity with skepticism and trepidation

he temperature was barely below freezing on the night of 19 February, but inside a converted warehouse in Queens,, thousands of people had gathered for the Coldest Winter Ever Ball – one of the largest ballroom events to ever take place.

“[Ballroom] was created by the necessity to give people a space,” Jack Mizrahi, co-founder of the House of Gorgeous Gucci, a member of the scene since the early 1990s, says in the Guardian film Inside New York’s underground ballroom scene. “It wasn’t created for people to learn it and go commercialize it.

“It’s an amazing feeling to be in a place where you’re accepted no matter what you are – and that’s really what ballroom is,” says Lola, Legendary Mother of the House of Gorgeous Gucci.Ballroom remained an underground subculture until the 1990s, when Madonna’s single Vogue and Jennie Livingston’s influential andStill, Mizrahi argues that ballroom’s influence on the vernacular has long been underestimated.

“People come into a community, and they say they love and respect it and that they’re paying homage to it,” he says. “But once their little soldiers strike and they storm out of that horse and they’ve already collected everything they want to collect, then they’re all up out of there. And then you [have] a group of people stuck still fending for themselves.

 

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