Black Pride: ArtsWestchester and House Ballroom Culture  

By Mackenzie Kwok  

In June, the United States recognizes Pride Month. In August, communities across the US also recognize Black Pride as its own unique and significant celebration of Black LGBTQIA+ folks who often go unrecognized during June’s celebrations. New York City Black Pride is an annual five-day event centering the contributions and achievements of Black and Latino LGBTQ+ communities.  

We spoke with Michael Roberson, an educator, theologian, and House Ballroom community organizer who partners with ArtsWestchester on House Ballroom Arts events, supported by Mid Atlantic Arts’ Folk and Traditional Community Projects program.  

The Legendary House of Xclusive Lanvin: On and Off the Runway program flyer.

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Image: The Legendary House of Xclusive Lanvin: On and Off the Runway program flyer. Credit: ArtsWestchester.

Introduce yourself! 
I am Michael Roberson. I’ve been doing public health and sexual health for the past 31 years in HIV prevention and research, particularly targeting Black and Latinx LGBTQ communities and the House Ballroom community. I have been a member of the Ballroom Community for about 30 years now. I also do race, sexuality, and theological work through the Center for Race and Religion and Economic Democracy. I went to Union College Seminary, and now I am a member of an international sound art collective called Ultra-Red that emerged out of the AIDS political movement ACT UP.  

What is House Ballroom culture? Who are the communities involved? 
I’m going to start present and move backwards in time. A great friend who is no longer here, Kai, whose shoulders I stand on, was the mother to help the very first public health HIV intervention targeting the Ball community. He used to say, House Ball is not just about houses, necessarily. It is a social network.  

House Ballroom emerges out of the drag ball circuit. It’s difficult to singularly define what it is, since it’s grounded in a community of oral tradition. In many ways, it emerges during the Harlem Renaissance and drag balls. For me, Ballroom is a global movement. It’s a collective of people who are predominantly Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, in the US context, who come together to compete at balls. For me, Ballroom culture is also a radical community organizing initiative, and a Black theology.  

How is Ballroom Culture a form of Black theology? 
I went to Union Theological Seminary to put theology in conversation with public health because the theology of abomination had direct impact on health disparities. The theology of abomination stems from homophobia. It claims that LGBTQ+ folks are situated outside of the image of God. This theology has dispossessed folks away from structures of care and belonging, leading us to believe our bodies have no value. This has had devastating and damaging effects on the lives of Black gay men, particularly those living with HIV. I saw that Black gay men and trans women were beginning to think that we were predisposed to becoming HIV positive. I wanted to change that narrative. For me, this community has to be theological because there is nothing else you can tell folks who have been told they’re no good to God.  

For me, Ballroom is a theological discourse as a contestation to the Black church. What does it mean for Black people moving from the South to the North, looking for new spaces of freedom, only to be unfree in the North? Ballroom gives us a new free space when the church rejected LGBTQ Black folks.   

So many things created as part of the Black gay infrastructure historically came out of the AIDS crisis. If not for the AIDS crisis, would we even have agencies we have? But Ballroom began organizing itself prior to AIDS. Ballroom was the most effective countercultural community.  

Why is it important to highlight Ballroom as traditional knowledge?  
Ballroom is an oral traditional community that has had such a rounded history. It has not been allowed to be considered part of the lexicon of movements of historical art and art expressions. Ballroom was and is in conversation with other artistic movements like hip hop, like the Nuyorican poet movement during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the city was at the brink of bankruptcy. Ballroom is a theological formation that has cultural products. It’s grounded in oral tradition.

A dancer arches back on the catwalk one knee on the floor and both hands over their head behind them. One leg point up to the ceiling.

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Image: Legendary Khaos Lanvin’s vogue femme performance during the Folk & Traditional Arts Community Projects grant-funded program “Ballroom has Something to Say: An Ode to Black Gay/Queer Men.” Credit: Susan Naqib.

What is the role of mentorship and intergenerational knowledge in House Ballroom? 
Mentorship and kinship are crucial to the generational transmission of traditions. Up until recently, we did not think we were that important, that our practices were significant. Ballroom is grounded in oral tradition and intergenerational knowledge. When you are queer and you have been told that because you are Black or Latinx and LGBTQ, the things you do and say mean nothing. Through kinship, mentorship and intergenerational transmission of traditions, we realize that we are important. We are significant.  

In 1967, Crystal LaBeija walked off stage in protests around racism and colorism in drag balls. She was the only African American drag performer who went back to the old Harlem drag ball circuit. She and other trans women created the House of LaBeija. A lot of people think she created drag balls, but she didn’t. She convinced people to create a House structure, with a mother, father, and children as community’s constructs. It was also responding to communities who were ostracized from their families of origin.  

When folks were ostracized from their families, people had to stay with other folks, particularly when the AIDS crisis hit. The mothers and fathers of Ballroom had to take care of their children. In fact, when people passed away, mothers and fathers were elders of the community. Elders could have been someone as young as 25 years old.  

When you are inducted in a House, the question is: what will you do for the community? How are you giving?  When I arrived into House, about 30 years ago, there were only four statuses: up and coming, statement, upcoming legend, and legend. Now, we have icons, pioneers, and legends. You are a legend if you have given back to the community.   

The mothers of a House had to organize and get people money, hold services for people who died from HIV. In New York specifically, we saw so many House members involved in public health and community organizing. We saw mentors training younger folks to respond to some of the disparities facing our community.  

My kinship daughter, Doctor Jennifer Lee, was the Deputy Executive Director at the HEAT (Health & Education Alternatives for Teens) Program. We were doing national organizing initiatives in 2016, and she got money to create something called House Lives Matter. This was new—we wanted to lift up the Black Lives Matter movement for what it was doing, while critiquing why nothing had been done about the Black trans women who had been brutalized. This is a national leadership initiative to address intersectional disparities impacting the community.  

My son, the Icon Pony Zion created Vogue Evolution, a Black and Latinx LGBT dance initiative. He wanted to be able to do HIV prevention and social justice to the art of vogue dance. We created this thing called vogue theory in relationship to it, which takes a theoretical framework of vogue as praxis to develop young folks’ leadership skills.  

What is Black Pride? Why is it important?  
It is important to call attention to this. Black Pride as a history began in the late 1980s in Washington, DC. Black LGBTQ folks were not being seen in the larger Pride in June. New York City Black LGBTQ+ Pride started in 1995. I was in charge of New York City Black Pride from 2003 to 2007. We used to throw the Heritage Ball, and there was a free HIV prevention organization ball that was a part of that. It is so grounded in community.  

What do you hope people take away from the House Ballroom events with ArtsWestchester? 
It depends on the audience. I want to challenge how people have traditionally believed what Ballroom means. We are a community that, in the US context, are for the most part descended from enslaved people. We have been told that our bodies are for commodity, that to perform for others’ gazes is to be legible. It is my desire to push folks to understand performance as politics and theology. How have we been told about our body only being valuable for the gaze of hegemonic power? I want to show that balls are politics 101: they organize people together at an event. While so many political movements organize around crisis, they don’t sustain themselves. But Ballroom organizes around joy in order to address crisis, so this is a political movement that can rejuvenate itself.  

Another thing is that archiving is important. Archiving is not something we used to think about, or we did not really think that the work we were doing is archival work. We have been told that our knowledge production was not worthy to archive. But now, we’re beginning to see a lot of throwbacks, people having videotapes from before. We have been archiving for years, and many Ballroom documentarians and archivists have held viewing parties. At these parties, House Ballroom Community members gather to critique, study, analyze, and enjoy video footage from past balls. Other Ballroom Community members have drawn from archival video footage for documentary films, like the recent film I’m Your Venus (2024). Our work is starting to become recognized as archiving.  

Chaksam-pa

Creating the 2023 Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellowship Awards 

By Ellie Dassler 

Each year, the National Association of Black Storytellers (NABS) awards the Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellowships (BASF) at their “In The Tradition…” Black Storytelling Festival and Conference. The Fellowships—funded by Mid Atlantic Arts’ Central Appalachia Living Traditions program and South Arts’ In These Mountains initiative—honor and promote practitioners of Black Appalachian storytelling traditions. NABS also presents each Fellow with a physical award by an African American artist. NABS commissioned Dr. Dena Jennings of Nasons, VA, to create the awards for the 2023 Fellows.  

Dr. Dena Jennings headshot. She holds a traditional African stringed instrument.

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Image: Dr. Dena Jennings. Credit: Laura Thompson

Jennings is a retired physician, activist, and artist who can trace her ancestry back seven generations in Appalachian Kentucky. She showed an early aptitude for creating—always disassembling and reassembling things in her parents’ home so she could figure out how they fit together—and has since become an accomplished maker of gourd banjos. “Gourd instruments are found in cultures around the world,” Jennings explains, including in the Appalachian Mountains. In fact, modern banjos are descended from instruments that enslaved Africans built out of gourds, cut in half and covered with stretched animal skins.  

In the early 2010s, Jennings began a four-year apprenticeship with celebrated gourd banjo builder and sculptor Jeff Menzies. Among the wisdom Jennings learned from Menzies was the importance of using local materials:  

“One of the things that was stressed in my apprenticeship was looking at how people around the world use the materials in their region and making use of those materials, rather than importing things that don’t naturally grow where you’re sculpting. It’s important to use the land and the materials that you have.” 

Each BASF award takes the form of a pear-shaped gourd, painted with the NABS logo. The gourd sits on top of a wormy maple pedestal and features a slot to hold a removable cow tail switch with a black bamboo handle. The cow tail switch is a traditional West African symbol of authority, which features in stories from the region. NABS Co-Founder Mother Mary Carter Smith shared the tradition with the organization, which now presents a cow tail switch to each new NABS President at the “Passing of the Cow Tail Switch Ceremony.” A hand holding a switch sits in the center of the NABS logo. 

Finished gourd awards and cow tail switches on a work bench.

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Image: The 2023 Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellowship awards in process in Jennings’ workshop. Credit: Dena Jennings.

Partially painted gourds at a table in front of a window.

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Image: Jennings painted each award with the NABS logo. Credit: Dena Jennings

Jennings wanted to incorporate the tradition of the cow tail switch in her BASF awards. “These people who are being given this award are storytellers,” she said, “and they’re in a teaching position. What better thing for a teacher to have than something that says, ‘I’m the speaker in this room’?” She also wanted the awards to be interactive:  

“The award should look great as it sits on a shelf, because that symbolizes the appreciation of the people giving you the award and the hard work that you did to earn it. But boy, wouldn’t it be neat if you could take a piece of that award with you when you’re out and about telling your stories?” 

Jennings incorporated all of this symbolism and her love of local materials into the awards. The gourds, black bamboo handles, maple pedestals, and even the natural pigments used to decorate them were all grown on Jennings’ property in Virginia. She carefully considered each material. For example, she chose a wormy maple for the bases because its whorled pattern “tells a story” of the insects that lived in the tree before Jennings and her husband milled and processed it.  

A bulbous dried gourd sits on a table. It has been scraped clean and hollowed out with a hole in the middle.

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Image: Carved gourds make up the center of each award. Credit: Dena Jennings

Six cow tail switches.

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Image: Switches made of cow tail hair and black bamboo are a traditional West African symbol of authority often carried by storytellers. Credit: by Dena Jennings.

Slabs of wood dry while a can of linseed oil is visible behind them.

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Image: Jennings prepares the base of each award out of wormy maple, which shows the paths carved by insects that lived in the wood. Credit: Dena Jennings.

Jennings expressed how honored she was to be chosen to create the 2023 BASF awards, and that she loved the process of designing and assembling each one, figuring out how the pieces fit together. “It was a real joy to think through and work through it,” she said. “My scientific mind was just having a field day!”  

A group of people hold gourd awards and cow tail switches while smiling for the camera.

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Image: The 2023 Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellows receive their awards. Credit: Taylor Dooley Burden.

The Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellows shared in that joy when they received the awards at the NABS Festival and Conference in November 2023. “I hope Dena Jennings knows she has sown such bounty in the making of this deeply meaningful award,” said L. Renée, the 2023 Fellow representing Virginia.  

L. Renée shared that she keeps her award on a bookshelf filled with poetry by Black writers:  “The gourd itself has so much spiritual and Black and African diasporic historical significance. It is both a vessel for sustenance and for music, since it can carry water or be used as an instrument. It also pays homage to Black folklore, which told the story of enslaved people following the drinking gourd (aka the Big Dipper) North to escape enslavement. It means our stories are our paths to freedom.”  

Lynette Ford, the 2023 Ohio Fellow, expressed similar feelings: “An award designed like no other, it connects the present efforts of Black Appalachian storytellers to the stories and knowledge of our ancestors. I am grateful and humbled to now have such a treasure of acknowledgement. It keeps me grounded as I continue a legacy of storytelling.” 

West Virginia Humanities Council

Step by Step Inc.

River House, Inc.

RiffRaff Arts Collective, Inc.

Putnam County Parks and Recreation

Huntington Old Time Dance and Music, Inc.

Huntington Museum of Art, Inc.