By Ryan Wong ’27

On October 11th, I walked a little over five minutes from my apartment to Maquinal, an underground cultural center that frequently hosts drag shows, balls, and indie rock concerts, to attend the “Into the Mirage” ball hosted by the House of Raksha, a house formed in Buenos Aires in 2022. From the entrance, painted with multi-colored tiles as if the building were a giant disco ball, I stepped into a bar lit dimly by red lights, an electropop song playing in the background. Chatting around me and posing for the camera in a designated photoshoot area were performers and attendees who had dressed to the nines, their white cloaks, hoods, gold jewelry, and smokey makeup inspired by Egyptian pharaohs and the Dune series. Dressed simply in jeans and a blue top, I hid myself in a corner beside a group of men who had similarly ignored or lacked an outfit for the ball’s theme. 

This ball and the house that organized it are part of an underground LGBTQI+ subculture pioneered by Black and Latino queer and transgender individuals between the 1960s and 1980s in New York City, known commonly as ballroom or ball culture. House ballroom, in which members of houses (groups of chosen families led by “mothers” and “fathers”) compete in various performance and appearance-based categories for awards and cash prizes, evolved from drag balls hosted in the mid-19th century. Black drag queens Crystal and Lottie LaBeija introduced the house system to ballroom culture, co-founding the first house (House of LaBeija) in 1968 and organizing the first all-Black ball in 1972 in response to the racism they experienced in the drag balls they attended. 

Alongside its competitive spirit, the ballroom was and is an important space of refuge for trans and queer individuals, particularly Black and Latino trans and queer working-class youth, who were able to find family, love, and unconditional acceptance onstage and in their houses in an otherwise hostile world. With the globalization of the 21st century, the ballroom scene has migrated from New York and other cities across the U.S. to other countries such as Argentina, whose balls began in Buenos Aires around 2017 and have since grown while respecting the ballroom’s integrity as a site of community and resistance.