Glitter and Concrete by Elyssa Maxx Goodman

Author:Elyssa Maxx Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2023-07-11T16:21:04+00:00

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Ballroom was devastated by AIDS, Rodriguez says, in part because of the stigma attached to the disease. Some people didn’t want to disclose or even acknowledge their status, and some in denial refused medication. Ballroom was a way to escape, to live a fantasy, so it wasn’t often discussed there. “Part of the glory of a ball was to be able to disconnect from your reality, so you had this night where you were a superstar and on Monday you had to deal with the fact that you were HIV positive, or that you were homeless, or that your family hated you,” Rodriguez says. By 1995 he had to stop going to the balls because he estimates about 90 percent of his friends in the community had died and going back was just too painful.

Rodriguez remembers getting a job in 1994 and being told about a 401(k), that when he’d turn sixty-five he’d have access to money he saved. “They lost me, because I didn’t think I’d get to that age. Nobody that I knew had. All the gay men that I [knew didn’t] get to thirty,” he said.

Ballroom house mothers and fathers like Avis Pendavis, Hector Xtravaganza, and Derek Ebony, among others, approached the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to offer the ballroom community education on sexual health, AIDS transmission, treatment, and prevention. The GMHC House of Latex program started in 1989 with peer educators and information tables at balls. “Between ’89 and ’94, it was just GMHC teaching the Mothers and the Fathers and some other members, whoever would show up, about safer sex, this is how you have sex, this is how you negotiate sex, this is how you bring it up,” said Luna Luis Ortiz. He helped organize the House of Latex Ball, thrown for the first time in 1994, an event that brings attention to safe sex practices and AIDS/HIV awareness, a process it continues today. The House of Latex has also expanded into the House of Latex Project, which “offers year-round programs for LGBTGNC youth and young adults of color within New York City’s House & Ball Community regardless of HIV status. Members of the H&B community, including houses and groups, have access to meeting spaces three evenings per week to conduct house practices, mini-Kiki ball competitions, and vogue lessons.” Similarly, GMHC’s Project Vogue, for which Ortiz is also the program coordinator, has taken steps to close the gap between young Black men and HIV prevention. The program is “about dance, self-expression, community, and being fabulous. It’s also about linking young Black men who have sex with men—the most at-risk group for HIV infection in New York City—with HIV treatment, prevention, and behavioral health care.”

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