What Does Voguing Have to Do With Political Resistance? It All Starts With One Simple Word.

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On a recent episode of Outward, host Bryan Lowder spoke with Michael Roberson, a theologian, public health practitioner, activist, artist, and most recently, author of the landmark new book Ballroom: A History, A Movement, A Celebration. The book has the feel of a high-end coffee-table retrospective, packed to the brim with glossy photos of iconic performers and competitions from the ballroom (as in voguing and legendary houses, not foxtrot) scene. But it also contains a rich mix of historical insights and cultural criticism that expands our understanding of ballroom culture beyond fierce performance and stunning looks to the realms of political action, art collective, and even theology.

In this excerpt from their conversation, Lowder and Roberson discuss what ballroom culture has to say to our moment of widespread anti-LGBTQ+ backlash, the scene’s focus on joy, and how to tell when your movement is going in the right direction. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Bryan Lowder: You were a consultant on the television series Pose, which I think of as this sort of high point in queer representation right before the anti-LGBTQ political and cultural backlash that we’re living through now in the United States, one that only seems to be getting worse week by week at this point. What do you think your book, and ballroom culture in general, has to offer its community, and maybe even people outside of it, in the context of all of this cruelty and fear? What should we be looking to ballroom for in this moment?

Michael Roberson: I believe that ballroom has something to say, something to teach the world about what it means to be human and the struggle for freedom in the face of catastrophe. It continues to move forward in spite of. One of the reasons it does that is because it organizes around joy. Most political organizing initiatives are responding to crisis. A crisis happens, and we organize to address the crisis. But what happens to the human, to the body, is that the body can’t take crisis after crisis after crisis after crisis. It’s going to break down, which then means the movement is going to break down. But ballroom’s intent—a ball’s intent is to be joyous.

So having a ball and then having two convenings afterwards or two convenings before it to organize people around issues [like public health] is organizing around joy. That community can then spread itself, globalize itself around that notion of joy.

Another thing: I think that how we can always tell we’re going the right way is when obstacles pop up. When a community who has been historically marginalized gains greater access to power and visibility, the blowback happens. I’ll just go far back as Lyndon B. Johnson and the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the blowback to that progress was Richard Nixon. Later, Jimmy Carter’s presidency represented poor people and Black folk having access to power, and the blowback is Ronald Reagan and George Bush. With Clinton, though he was problematic around the crime bill, his relationship to Black folk and marginalized communities was strong, and the blowback was George Bush II. And then Barack Obama, even though a lot of his legislation, one can see, was neoliberal to some degree, his representation as a Black man was powerful, and the blowback was Donald Trump. So you can always tell from that pattern.

I think ballroom has something to teach because there’s not a community that’s not represented in a ballroom. Ballroom, through the lineage of the drag ball going back to the Harlem Renaissance, then morphing through the ethos of Black trans women 100 years later, now exists in Vietnam, it exists in Putin’s Russia. Go figure. It exists in Uganda and Ghana, right? Go figure. It exists in São Paulo, Brazil, in Paris, in Toronto, in Vancouver and Montreal. It exists in Mexico City. I mean, go figure. The globalization of it is powerful. That’s why I say that it has something to teach the world over. We have been here before and we will always find a way out of no way. We will always make a way out of no way.

Listen to more of this conversation on Outward, Slate’s LGBTQ podcast: