The Love Ball

• In Event: After Dark: Empire, Race, and the Political Economy of Nightlife

Abstract

In this paper I examine how the 1989 and 1991 Love Ball fundraisers represented a pivotal moment for house-structured ballroom culture, as houses came together to confront the HIV/AIDS crisis while grappling with the newfound visibility and the mainstreaming of a once-underground community. In 1989, members of the ballroom culture collaborated with each other, the Design Industry For Fighting AIDS (D.I.F.F.A.) and celebrities to organize the inaugural Love Ball fundraiser. Love Ball I and II raised over $2.5 million to support HIV/AIDS programs, with $400,000 going to direct frontline housing for people living with AIDS. Voguers and other ballroom competitors used their talents to combat an epidemic that had ravaged their community and was being ignored by the US government. While a partnership with D.I.F.F.A. and celebrities provided mobilization of much needed resources, it also expedited ballroom’s transformation into a global commodity. I trace the Love Ball fundraisers as an arena where, to think with Uri McMillian, ballroom performers deployed “embodied avatars” to shield their interiority in the middle of the first rapid mainstreaming of ballroom culture (McMillan, 2015). While organized abandonment, gentrification, the so-called War on Drugs, and the collapse of the social safety net intensified, many members of house- structured ballroom culture died entirely preventable deaths.

In this paper, I consider the central contradiction of the devastation of the AIDS crisis being most acute in house-structured ballroom communities while the number of annual balls and houses exploded in the latter years of the long 1980s (Allen 2021).. I draw on oral histories from survivors of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the house-structured ballroom community and revisit memories of the crisis and the Love Balls. In tandem with MFSB classic song Love is the Message, I end the presentation with meditations on the ethic of love that shaped early houses and enabled pioneers of ballroom culture to continue to organize balls and express immense creativity when faced with the ever-present reality of death.

Author

• Victor Ultra Omni, Emory University