MOVIES : At the Drag Queens’ Ball : Jennie Livingston’s documentary, ‘Paris Is Burning,’ delves into sexual and ethnic self-image--and elicits charges of exploitation

In a recent interview, Madonna said that her friend Michael Jackson was in need of an image makeover and she had the perfect inspiration for him: the Harlem transvestite scene. After a couple of weeks of hanging around it, she suggested, he’d be a new man.

She should know. A couple of years ago, Madonna popularized “voguing,” a dance style that had originated in Harlem at drag-ball competitions in which blacks and Latinos mimicked the preening of high-fashion models and movie legends. “Vogue,” Madonna’s No.1 hit and video, was the sanitized interpretation of a gritty ghetto aesthetic that has been captured in “Paris Is Burning,” Jennie Livingston’s documentary that opens in Los Angeles Friday after a record-breaking run at the Film Forum in New York.

The oddly evocative title refers to the name of one such ball featured in the 78-minute film, which shared both the 1990 Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. award for best documentary and this year’s grand jury prize at the Sundance Festival. Yet despite the accolades, the low-budget film (about $450,000) went without national release for about a year until Prestige picked it up. Distributors were skeptical about its appeal outside New York. Their doubts, which will be put to the test in coming weeks, are understandable for the film focuses on the pageantry of one of society’s most marginal cultures: poor black and Latino gays, some of whom are transvestites and transsexuals.

Yet much of the drama stems from these outcasts’ glorification of the conventional as well as the glamorous. At the balls, they compete for cash prizes and trophies in categories that go well beyond gender-bending. Homeboys and homegirls alike are judged on their ability to impersonate not only the opposite sex, but also college students, Wall Street bankers (right down to briefcases filled with airline tickets and credit cards), and society snobs in jodhpurs--the very groups that would reject them.

Despite the outre subject matter, however, Livingston, a 29-year-old Yale graduate, maintains that the subculture depicted in “Paris Is Burning” serves as a microcosm of sorts. “The movie shows people something they’ve never seen before in a way that mirrors something they know intimately--living in a consumerist media society,” she says. “The people in this film are simply responding in their own way to the intense social pressure to conform to certain images. We all feel that.”

As parody or satire, the sight of ghetto youth in upper-class togs would be stunning proletarian performance art. But the cultural cross-dressing is for real. “This is white America,” explains the ball emcee. “And when it comes to the minorities, especially black, we as a people, is the greatest example of behavior modification in the history of civilization. . . . That is why if you have captured the Great White Way of living, or looking, or dressing, or speaking, you is a marvel!”

Studded with such loaded images, the documentary raises troubling questions--about ethnic self-hatred, the fluidity of sexual identity and the social tyranny of the media. While Livingston has been praised by both white and African-American critics for her handling of these thorny problems, others have questioned the wisdom of bringing to light the spectacle of ghetto youth kneeling “at the throne of whiteness”--especially when such worship demands stealing, lying and going hungry in order to outfit themselves. In a critical article in Z magazine, a Boston cultural journal, writer Bell Hooks painted the white, upper-middle-class filmmaker as a sort of intrepid bwana voyaging into the “heart of darkness” to bring back African-American exotica for white consumption.

Hooks notes that the very popularity of the film with Manhattan’s smart set confirms its titillating appeal. She wrote: “What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might make revolutionary struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that the victims are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasies of ruling class white culture?”

The criticism makes Livingston bristle. “I am aware that there is a long history of whites exploiting African-American culture just as there is of men exploiting women’s work,” she says. “But we live in a multicultural environment and can’t help but be influenced by each other. This is certainly not an authoritative statement about blacks or Latins but a film about a gay subculture which does not ‘belong’ exclusively to any one group any more than African-American culture does.”

While conceding that the perception of blacks worshiping white culture is “problematical” in her film, Livingston points out that the capitalist portraits are not the sole center of ball life. Indeed, some of the odder categories include “Bangee Realness,” in which thugs--called “bangees”--of both sexes are mimicked (“There’s Benji, looking just like the boy who robbed you a few minutes before you came to the ball,” says the emcee) and “Luscious Body: Femme Queens, 300 Pounds and Over,” which proves that conventional standards of beauty don’t always hold sway. There are takes as well on the military, bodybuilding and divas like Patti LaBelle.

Moreover, Livingston contends that it is a misconception to think that these blacks and Latinos “want to be white.” The mimicry, she says, is as much about class as about race. She notes that on the Phil Donahue show, Kim Pendavis, who appears in the film, remarked that what he and his peers desire are the privileges of the dominant class--not its skin color. “They just want to own the yacht and there aren’t a lot of black yacht owners for role models,” she says, noting that she believes her film condemns the forces in society that feed such fantasies to the poor. “What’s tragic is not what people in the ball world do, but what’s imposed on them from without,” she adds.

The filmmaker says she first recognized the opportunity to examine this and other issues surrounding gender, race and class in the summer of 1985 when she noticed “voguers” in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. They eventually invited the fledging filmmaker to observe a more formal expression of the athletic dance form at their drag balls and she walked through the looking glass into a surreal landscape. She learned, as we do in the film, that Latino and black gays belong to “houses,” groups that act as a bulwark against the hostility to be found not only on the streets, but also in their families who reject them because of their sexuality.

Nurtured by elders called “mothers” and “fathers,” the “children” exact their revenge on ballroom turf under such names as the “House of Chanel,” “House of Ninja” and “House of Xtravaganza.” At balls at Harlem’s Elks Lodge on 129th Street and the Gay Community Center in Greenwich Village, Livingston met the iconoclastic characters who would eventually provide the narrative spine of her film: Dorian Corey, a wise old nightclub performer; Pepper Labeija, the flamboyant “mother of the House of Labeija”; transsexuals Venus Xtravaganza and Octavia St. Laurent; Junior Labeija, the acerbic emcee, and Willi Ninja, a muscularly handsome voguer.

Livingston spent two years on the ball circuit before filming began. Although she is now openly lesbian, she says few were aware of it at the time. She earned the trust of the ball walkers simply by her presence. “At first, some people wondered what I was doing there,” she recalls. “But if you hang out enough, people come to believe and trust you. The truth is I didn’t feel so separate from them. I live in a society that doesn’t respect women, either their bodies or their work. When I was 17 and read Vogue, I felt pretty inferior too.”

Willi Ninja, who was the first to meet her, says: “Jennie was just this curious, petite little thing with a (camera). She wanted to cover something that nobody else wanted covered. We were considered an eyesore. What’s this stink about a white woman making this film? Who expected it to get this far anyway?”

From 1987 to 1989, Livingston shot more than 70 hours of film, which she edited with Jonathan Oppenheim into a study of ball walkers in flamboyant performance, as well as in moments of quiet reflection. “I argued to make the politics more overt,” she says. “Jonathan insisted the people had to be likable. It was a compromise.”

With no narration and the filmmaker present only in the occasional off-camera question, “Paris” is voyeuristic in style. While African-American poet Essex Hemphill admires the approach for allowing “the authentic voice of the ball community to emerge unfettered,” Hooks criticizes it not only for emphasizing spectacle over content, but also for neglecting to address directly how white power and privilege impedes black progress. The critic contends that Livingston makes it easy for the audience to applaud the film because it gets them off the hook. Says Hooks: “It leaves the audience with no sense that we are all responsible for the conditions of poverty and marginalization we witness in the film. It wouldn’t be quite as entertaining nor, I suspect, as successful if it did.”

Livingston counters that her film burlesques the power structure through slick footage of affluent images spliced into the film to contrast with the dreary ballroom. In fact, the jumps between Harlem and Fifth Avenue are sometimes so fast that, for a comic moment, the viewer might mistake society matrons shopping at Gucci for drag queens. “If the viewer watches those images and listens carefully, and still chooses to believe it has nothing to do with him or her, then they are simply blind to racism,” she says. “No film can force you to acknowledge social evil if you’re hellbent on believing those problems don’t exist.”

Yet it is difficult for even the most politically astute not to come away from “Paris” without a sense that these lives, some of them anyway, are pathetic, if not tragic. What is most unsettling about the film is the internalized racism of people who yearn to be inside a world they can never be a part of. Ironically, the acuity with which a ball walker impersonates The Other is called “realness,” as in “Executive Realness” or “Dynasty Realness.” It is the coin of the realm, jargon for the ability to “pass”--as a “butch” heterosexual, a captain of industry, a high-fashion female model, a rich temptress. In other words, the more one is able to erase any vestige of difference, the more “real” one is judged to be.

While Livingston admits that there is a danger in being too caught up in one’s fantasy, she denies that self-hatred is a large part of the ball walkers’ escapism. “On the contrary, I think these men are empowered by these images,” she says. “Here are people taking the most vapid elements of our culture and turning them into something that is spiritually sustaining. The ball people I film could have turned out spiteful or angry, but instead they opted for a wildly creative life. The balls are a response to homophobia and racism, but one full of optimism and spirit.”

The filmmaker contends that the real difficulty for some activists may be that this particular subset is an embarrassment to them. “These people aren’t about to burn up the neighborhood,” Livingston says. “They could care less about the Black Muslims. That’s not their form of revolution. They don’t represent all blacks and Latinos but they have as much a right to emulate whoever they want as other people do. Some people might think that’s politically incorrect but then that makes me mad. If you want to be into fashion, you should be able to be into fashion.”

Pepper Labeija feels that politics has little to do with what he sees as entertainment. “You’ve heard of the Third World?” he asks. “Well, the ball set is the Fourth World. We run the gamut of our fantasies and I don’t think it does anyone any harm. It’s fun! Everyone knows that money doesn’t guarantee you happiness but it can buy you a damn good imitation. I do think that Jennie missed the point that there is life after the ball. She didn’t let people know that this is a hobby, not a whole life. We don’t all stand on the pier and vogue all night.”

Dorian Corey agrees with Hooks that Livingston “soft-peddles” the film in lieu of asking hard questions about racism and lack of opportunity for blacks and Latinos. But, he adds, the ball world is basically a celebration. “I’m afraid drag queens are a poor source of revolutionary material,” he says. “But these ‘houses’ do a lot of good in a small way for these kids. I don’t think they hate themselves. It gives them a credential, a source of self-respect they wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Corey adds that the film has given him an unprecedented amount of attention. Though that casts Livingston in the role of benefactor, it also brings up the perennial issue of whites co-opting black culture--something that Livingston herself addresses in documentary scenes that show “voguing” emerging into the mainstream. The filmmaker says that her arduous five-year struggle to raise production money best answers charges of exploitation. It came in dribs and drabs--including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the BBC and PBS--and she was frequently called upon to justify her interest in the subject matter to African-Americans on grant committees. While the film is critically successful, she says, it has yet to show a profit.

Livingston believes that appropriation of black culture by whites is wrong when proper credit is not given--Elvis Presley’s copying of R&B;, for example. She says she finds it hard to fault Madonna because the singer has vocally supported the ball community. The singer hired Jose Xtravaganza to be one of her dancers and he is visible in the “Truth or Dare” documentary as part of the Blond Ambition Tour.

“The ultimate irony is that this group created a subculture based on imitating the rich and famous who are now imitating them,” says Livingston, acknowledging the role of her own film in this process. “It’s like this hall of media mirrors. It’s the sort of culture-gobbling that could probably only happen in America.”