Still Here

Queer family is real. And indeed, the realness of queer family has as its counterpoint the hegemonic notion of family as based in blood. While all family formations are political, queer family formations ask that we think the politics of family as an always already problematic formation. The existence of queer family, then, highlights how other family forms necessarily exceed the normative definition and practice of hegemonic family claims. Of course, hegemonic practices of family have evolved beyond the logic of blood, but one might argue that a notion of “blood relations” is still very much the basis of how even families made through adoption are generally understood. Unconditional love and commitment comes to stand in for blood as a way to perpetuate normative codes for the hegemonic family form in patriarchal white supremacist capitalism.Interestingly, one might say that for a certain generation of gay men, blood, too, has been a kind of familial bind: if not blood, then semen; if not semen, then fluid(s). By the latter I mean to signal how HIV/AIDS has worked to produce “familial” relations among gay men, as a kind of cement, working in a similar fashion as blood did for the hegemonic family form. Blood and semen have come to mark and make possible the “familial relations” of the discourse of family central to the politics of contemporary queer life, but this is family politics with a difference: it is a family politics launched against hegemonic normative family claims, if you wish. The emergency of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic for black families is central to rethinking the hegemonic family form as we know it. Indeed, black families have been since slavery queer family forms. However, black queer family forms further complicate an already queer dynamic because the black family form exists on the margins of all other family forms as the deficit and or excess of hegemonic claims of the family. Thus the black family form might also be the most policed and reviled family form.Marlon Bailey's Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ball Culture in Detroit begins with the trope of “family” to explain how he entered into and came to understand the work that his book seeks to do. Bailey retells the story of his “brother” who seroconverted at age nineteen and how, as nonblood brothers, the bond forged through that “event” became central to the kind of book and research he was able to undertake in its aftermath. As Bailey recounts the story of his brother's diagnosis and twenty-five years or more now of living his life with HIV, an intimacy of the kind that is generally thought to frame hegemonic familial relations is revealed. The way in which Bailey leads the reader to consider such familial intimacy is a political maneuver meant to unhinge family from old blood relations but that also works to produce family as something more than just choice. By so doing, Bailey immediately orients the reader to an unfolding of family that, while it will not be surprising for many contemporary readers, nonetheless asks us to (re)consider what and how family works, and what it means and how it is enacted for us. Bailey proffers an ethics of family that requires us to pay attention to the consequences of familial claims. Of course, one cannot write a book about ballroom culture without engaging the question of family, given that family is central to the houses of ball culture. However, I want to suggest that Bailey has given us something more as well. His delineation of the gender system in the houses and its reference to traditional familial relations and order both retains and jettisons the family form as we know it. Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of Bailey's work might be a reminder of how to live with contradiction.Butch Queens Up in Pumps is more than a study of ballroom culture. To make such a claim is not to take anything away from the significant ethnographic and archival work that Bailey engages to produce this study of ball culture. The “something more” of this study is the way in which familial politics and fluids or blood have shaped ball culture in Detroit. Bailey's attention to these kinship networks provides us with a difficult and devastating picture of fractured black (queer) family and how black queers—most but not all of whom were assigned male at birth and articulate a wide range of gender identifications—have worked to re-create families of love, care, and support in the face of racist-homophobia. By “racist-homophobia,” I mean the ways in which white supremacy attempts to limit, and often succeeds at limiting, the life chances of black queer people, and the way in which black heteronormativity or homophobia is often enacted against black queer people. The combined force of racist-homophobia places black queer people in a unique position from which to assess contemporary queer culture and its many claims, and this is what Bailey's work offers us. Especially when it comes to HIV/AIDS, black queer people arguably occupy a vantage point from which to access a historical present that is utterly unique and that complicates the “new” queer settlement, marriage, drug cocktails, and all the other elements of our present moment.Bailey provides readers with a detailed description of ballroom's gender signs and order. However, the book does not investigate these signs and orders as much as it seeks to diagnose how gender-nonconforming queer black people make lives through using ballroom as a significant life-affirming resource. Bailey's nuanced articulation of gender is positioned through a nexus of race, gender, and sexuality that resists privileging either gender or sexuality in favor of mapping blackness as the foundational marker of the exclusions and resistances he seeks to document. Bailey's work thus sets a template for further discussions concerning gender nonconformity in black queer studies and, more broadly, in transgender studies. A significant contribution of this work lies in Bailey's respect for the gender fluidity that arises when persons whose gender performances and identifications move between the ballroom and other social and cultural spaces; in crossing contexts, gender emerges as simultaneously indeterminate, often already assured and situational.These folks produce gender fluidity as a way of life, and even as a way of navigating a racist, homophobic, and transphobic world. Through Bailey's lens, it might be argued that ballroom gives us one of the most complicated gender systems of any contemporary queer formation we have witnessed.This past February (2015), I participated in an event celebrating twenty-five years of Jenny Livingston's Paris Is Burning (Livingston [1991] 2005). The audience was the whitest one I have seen in recent memory for a film that featured black lives. The cult status of Livingston's film is in direct opposition to the status that black queer people are accorded in contemporary queer culture. Given the context that I was in, I could not help but move the end of my written comments to the beginning of my talk. I began, then, with calling out the names of all those in the film who had passed on. I insisted that the audience repeat their names. I was not engaging in some form of domination, but I wanted the audience to share in the intimacy of saying those names in the hope that something about knowing a name and uttering it might produce a different relation to the person being called out. Indeed, contemporary queer culture is full of black creativity without being able to name the black persons responsible for the creative contributions.Unfortunately and ambivalently, it is now almost impossible to come to ballroom culture without going through Paris Is Burning. Paris Is Burning has left in its wake a relation to black queer culture that is both sadly nuanced and madly spectacular. In its aftermath one cannot think of balls without Paris Is Burning's proliferating imagery and pageant. But what is often missing from Paris Is Burning is a sustained engagement with the lives lost. The carnage that HIV/AIDS and racist-homophobia wreaked on the subjects of that film remains one of the most unobserved aspects of the aftermath of the film in white queer culture. Almost all the film's subjects are gone now. Similarly, the way in which the subjects of the film offered us their unapologetically trans lives and desires, without recourse for respectability, remains unmatched still in contemporary queer culture. Indeed, Livingston was allowed extraordinary access, and we have benefited from that access as viewers. Yet what continues to rankle is how a film so celebrated and loved by white queers does not lead to forms of engagement with black queer life that is meaningful. Indeed, the HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to devastate black lives, a point noted in the film, but a point that could be the basis of a more complex relationship between black and other queers, which has yet to occur.Butch Queens Up in Pumps is neither a counterpoint nor an extension of Paris Is Burning. Bailey's book sits alongside the film offering readers a different kind of intimacy. While Livingston gives us the outside-in look, Bailey gives us the inside-out-inside look, a way of seeing that is both about belonging and being outside simultaneously, conditioned by familial intimacy and love. Bailey's work is constituted through a politics of love that grapples with and recognizes the stakes of racist-homophobia for black queer life. The work asks it readers to recognize the limits of the hegemonic black family form at the same time that it asserts new ways of being family in the context of ongoing discourses and material practices that seek to pathologize and even make black families of all kinds impossible. Butch Queen Up in Pumps, then, is a book that in part maps the ways in which black family forms persist despite an array of forces meant to invalidate black personhood.Indeed, the story of Butch Queen Up in Pumps can be read as a story of survival. Bailey's “family” in the pages of this book not only survive the rejection of hegemonic families, homophobic communities, an antiblack national culture, and so on; they also make meaningful lives while doing so. Bailey documents a ball culture concerned with raising funds for HIV/AIDS organizations. Utilizing his concept of “housework,” Bailey offers readers an account of ballroom activism around HIV/AIDS that is sobering and necessary, all the while demonstrating the creative energies of black queer subjecthood. It is this aspect of Bailey's work that makes its most original contribution, his thinking through HIV/AIDS and ball culture. It is somewhat startling that, twenty-five years after Paris Is Burning, Bailey's intervention is so necessary—HIV/AIDS was the unspoken backdrop to that very popular film and remains a crisis today.The link between members of the ball scene and HIV/AIDS service providers is especially important, given how the balls function as gathering places for a population that safer-sex advocates wish to reach. Bailey's work brings him into conversation with the many in Detroit who work across the two contexts. Bailey's work documents how successful such cross-fertilized contexts can be and how such contexts can sometimes not work as well. Indeed, the ongoing epidemic of HIV/AIDS in black communities and among the ball community is evidence of the complicated context of the problem. But Bailey also skillfully points out that those who are closest to the actual lives of those affected are often not listened to as well. What Bailey documents is the work that racist-homophobia does to impede the lives of black queers. Thus the analysis offered by Bailey of HIV prevention efforts and their lack of impact fits a longer historical pattern of the state's disregarding black people's views, understandings, and assessments of their lives. The consequences of such disregard are always dire for black populations, and HIV/AIDS is our contemporary condition of such disregard.It is precisely the disregard for black queer life that makes Butch Queen Up in Pumps an important book. Bailey offers readers insight into how black queers (re)make and make selves fashioned in-between and against an array of forces. Butch Queens up in Pumps ask us to consider our ethical relation to black queer people, their lives and their deaths. Bailey complicates how black queers work within, across, and against gender performance to create worlds in which their lives might have some value. The forms of creative deconstruction, renovation, and invention that black queer people produce have much to teach us about how it might be possible to imagine new worlds, put them into place, and make them viable, even as those worlds are surrounded by forces hostile to their very existence. The ballroom scene is a glimpse into such worlds. Indeed, Bailey offers us crucially important insights into how black queer life is a necessary life of creative destruction and invention but also one that is fulfilling in ways that hegemonic contemporary queer culture can't seem to notice or can only notice at the site of entertainment, like Rupaul's drag race. Instead, Butch Queens Up in Pumps reveals to us pleasure, death, and life as creative forces shaping everyday existence always slightly ahead of that which seeks to drag us into the abyss

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