I first watched Paris Is Burning when I was living in Brighton. I had just made my first Trans friend and she was like a mother to me. She was stunning, absolutely stunning. But also completely, through lack of a better word, normal. There was nothing out of the ordinary really about her. She was just an incredible person. But she was also Trans. Up until that point I hadn't knowingly been close friends with a Trans person. I got to know her, hear her story and where she'd come from, what she'd been through. She was the first person who actually told me, 'l think you're Trans.' Up until that point l knew it but I was in denial. Doing her 'Mother Trans' bit, trying to get me to understand myself, she recommended films that I should watch. She showed me Paris Is Burning. The 1990 documentary film chronicles the underground New York City ballroom culture and the legendary Houses that competed in it. But it's about so much more. The real-life Black, Italian, Latinx, gay and Transgender cast offer a window into a world on the fringes of society. The film is such a central part of queer culture, you’ll know much of its lingo without even realising where it's from. House Mothers, reading, realness, shade, opulence - all phrases immortalised in Paris ls Burning. Our culture, so often erased or hidden to protect ourselves, recorded forever.
I'll never forget watching Paris for the first time. I can see it so clearly, even now. I remember my friend was cooking whilst I was watching it and I was just crying throughout the whole thing. So much of what they were saying was how I'd felt my entire life and I didn't know how to put it into words. Words have power. Their words spoke me into being. Take away the fact that it's in New York, take away the fact that it's about the Ballroom scene, take away the fact that it’s the 1980s. I felt the same way as so many of those characters. To see my feelings put into words and pictures was so overwhelming for me. Paris ls Burning was really the first time I managed to see that and feel that. It was an awakening and an education. Up until that point I think it's safe to say I was fairly uneducated when it comes to queer history. The queer history that I did know was extremely white. I knew about Quentin Crisp. I knew about Oscar Wilde ... and in the eighties I'd heard Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the glam-electro bands like Erasure. But it was all white. I knew about Madonna's 'Vogue' before I knew where Madonna's 'Vogue' came from. They were echoes. Paris ls Burning was the first time I visited the source of all this culture. I came face to face with the originators, and they looked just like me.
I saw queer history through a white lens, because that's what I had been immediately exposed to. To be able to identify the root and to figure out that I had a direct link to the provenance of so much queer history was extremely empowering for me. It involved me and it allowed me to access a power that took my difference and made it positive, turning it into something that I could always get power from. That's what happens when you realise you connect to those who went before you; they become an immense source of ancestral power that you can draw from whenever you need to. You are not the first to walk this path. Our stories echo each other. Black and brown Trans women have trod this ground, clearing a path for you. They are there when you need to call on them, stretching back thousands of years. This is the power of connecting to your true family. Stand in that power.
In Paris ls Burning, Mother of the House of LaBeija, Pepper LaBeija, reminisces about her own mother finding her mink coat and burning it: 'She don't want me in girl's clothes, she can't take it.' When I first told my own mother that I was Trans, she did not take it well whatsoever. It was very much, 'Well, don't we have a say in this?' I think she felt that she was going to lose her child. She thought that I was going to turn up one day on her doorstep and I wouldn't be the same person. Of course that's not what happens. That situation just goes to show that people fear what they don't know. What a lot of parents of Trans kids or their children who are Trans don't realise is that you're not losing a child, you're gaining a happier child. You're gaining someone who understands and loves themselves enough to make a very difficult decision, which is beginning a transition. Being Trans is not a choice. But making the choice to love yourself and be who you are authentically, is. And that’s a choice that should be celebrated.
As soon as my mum saw me being who I am and being successful in what I want to achieve for myself, our relationship got so much better, because actually she realised she'd got everything to gain by being there for her child and understanding and educating herself to better herself as a person. Not just as a mother, but as a person, so that she could be there. I had to do the same as well. I had to understand how difficult it was for my parent; she hadn’t had the exposure to Trans culture that I had, she grew up in a transphobic country. All countries are transphobic. We live in a transphobic society, so the likelihood is that you probably are too. We weren't having the conversations that we are having now.
My mother and I had a real journey, but now my mum is so supportive of me and she sends me articles that I'm in before I even see them and tells me when I've got a good write-up and tells me what she thinks about certain looks that I'll post or whatnot. I would never have thought ever that we’d be on this page ... It's never really about clothes, it's never really about makeup; it's about not understanding and also being afraid of what society is going to think about your child.