Foreword: Just last week in my religion and ethics in film class, a college course that serves as my first - but certainly not lone - religion class in my personal academic history, we watched the documentary Paris is Burning. At the beginning of the term, I blindly selected this film as the film of the term I'd write a four page "response paper" on, picking a core issue or topic from the film I found interesting, puzzling, or disagreeable and dissect it, also utilizing an assigned reading (in this case, James B. Nelson's thought-provoking "Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology") to help make my case. Working off rather broad instructions, I whipped up what I think is an efficient dissection of the film's ability to maximize the understanding of a culture that has been unfairly marginalized and severely damaged by a variety of negative forces. I'll let the remainder of the paper do the talking; this will also serve as my "review" for Paris is Burning, for after writing this, I feel I went deeper than a normal review would have and this piece, in particular, picks one core issue and divulges it explicitly rather than hopscotching around multiple ideas. As always, enjoy and I thank you for reading.
The Essay: Throughout my entire trimester in religion and ethics in film, the class has been shown a wide variety of different films from varying countries and conflicting theologies showcasing a barrage of themes and ideas surrounding not just religion but ethical behavior in general. A common theme in most of the films we have watched is the repression of something, be it sexual desires, temptation, or sinful acts. Breaking the Waves told the story of a regressive woman who turned to a life of sex and prostitution following her paralyzed husband’s request, The Last Temptation of Christ depicted a more uncertain Jesus Christ, who found himself toying with the idea of sex and self-identity whilst trying to deliver the message of God, and even Malcolm X portrayed the fiery civil rights leader as one who had a difficult time forgoing his tumultuous life of petty crime in order to accept a power higher than himself. All of these films showcased repression of something that, regardless of whether or not it was healthy for the person or for the person’s environment, an individual had a difficult time grappling with. With Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, a renowned documentary concerning New York’s ball culture, we see all repressions, regressive ideas, and fears of being labeled, ostracized, or demonized sent straight out the window in favor of freedom and incorruptible self-expression. Paris is Burning concerns a great deal of topics related to homosexuality, but the biggest one is peer acceptance and the fearlessness that comes with embracing a person’s true character rather than putting on a face and an aura, pretending you’re someone you’re not.
Stepping back to focus on a broader idea, homosexuality has long been a thing that has been deemed sinful and an affront to not only the Christian God but to the central deity in many religions around the world. James B. Nelson’s essay “Embodiment,” focusing on the depiction and public view of homosexuality in Christian theology, dissects how one of the most impacting and far-reaching religions the world has ever known has gone on to shape society’s view of homosexuality in an incredibly negative light, with social repercussions the United States of America is finding themselves entangled with in the present day (Nelson 4). Early on in his essay, Nelson says the Christian church holds a great deal of the blame for shaping the public’s, generally speaking, negative and hostile view of homosexuality. This line of thinking stems not only from basic biblical teaching and interpretation, but the heavy role religion plays into politics. Political leaders who are usual open about their faith and their theology more commonly denounce homosexuality as not only something not beneficial or healthy for the moral fabric of society, but biblically sinful and something that degrades the holy teachings of The Bible. Nelson further elaborates on this point late in the essay, saying how the Christian church’s exclusion of gay people has been one gigantic paradox for the religion all together. Rather than adhering to Christian ideas of loving thy neighbor and gathering all men and women together to worship and pray to one almighty being, the Church hasn’t taken the idea of sexuality seriously, leaving many homosexuals to ignore the teachings of the church entirely, viewing them as primitive (Nelson 29). Nelson is essentially saying that homosexuals have felt repressed, excluded, and generally lost thanks to the church’s exclusionist and dismissive attitudes concerning not only homosexuality but the complex notions and ideas surrounding sexual orientation and gender identification. Combine these elements with confusing legislature, with a handful of states recognizing discrimination of homosexuals and implementing equal employment and marital benefits to same-sex couples and other states not even batting an eye at such an issue, and you have a culture that understandably feels mistreated and lost. The homosexual community, according to Nelson, is not only in search of some congressional and institutional acceptance, but an entire shift in the social attitude towards homosexuality, with a difficult solution being something resembling recognition of a culture that has long been shortchanged.
Returning to my original point and subject, Paris is Burning is something that helps homosexuality’s case for attempting to be understood as an idea and a practice. This understanding is achieved by said film and its documentarian by presenting a specific niche segment in a large city’s population through a non-judgmental and simultaneously revealing lens that peels off the layers to this culture in order to assist in it being understood and accepted. Paris is Burning shows the interworkings of the gay community’s ball competitions, which are essentially glamorous, high-profile fashion shows for the homosexual and transgender community, by providing audiences with insight into the way the shows participants are judged, what common practices are found at one of these balls, and the lifestyles of prominent figures in the community. Through all of this, the audience is given a look at this community in the best way possible, which is by confining them to the four walls of the ball competitions. Rather than featuring numerous talking heads, political leaders, and an uninformed public give their opinions on the participants and the ball culture, we spend seventy-six uninterrupted minutes inside this counterculture and viewing it the way the participants want it to be viewed. The homosexual and transgender community has had enough marginalization; they have had plenty of souls step in and tell them how the life they’re living is wrong, sinful, morally bankrupt, and so on and have seen more discrimination than many of us will ever know. Here is their chance to show the world what they do and why/how they do it, with no interruption from the uninformed or politically biased.
The embracement of these feelings is key to understanding the culture, in my opinion. We commonly hear cases of celebrities or other high-profile figures “coming out of the closet,” meaning they’ve assimilated to normative culture by publicly repressing homosexual desires and ideas and have gone on living as an assumed heterosexual. The subjects in Paris is Burning are far, far away from the closet; many of them are flamboyant and brazenly open about their sexual orientation, something most people, I feel, don’t think of when they think of homosexuals. Socialization in the United States has quietly made us assume that even the different have an obligation to try and fit in with the dominant culture or they risk disrupting the social order of society – a narrow and repressive, functionalist attitude of social behavior. Not the ball culture in New York City. They don’t care at all what kind of social order they’re disrupting, or, for that matter, what kind of effect they have on the big picture. They want to be able to publicly express themselves and not be hamfisted into a box they can’t fit into, oversimplified into caricatures and demeaning terms, or marginalized by being spoken about in empirical, statistical terms entirely void of any social identity. They simply want to be expressive about their culture, and enjoy a fraction of the limelight the normative culture enjoys and takes for granted. One subject in Paris is Burning describes the annual ball as the gay man’s Oscars, Grammy’s, or some other mainstream, heavily-anticipated/watched awards program. This is the time for the marginalized minority to shine and completely embrace not what makes them interchangeable and able to blend into dominant culture, but what makes them unique and human.
Works Cited:
Nelson, James. B. “Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology.” Augsburg Publishing House. Pages: 180 – 210.
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