equality ball

As the United States prepares to enter another particularly brutal presidential election cycle, the country’s cultural divide is continuing to play out across entertainment. In film, there are the dual box office phenomenons of Barbie and the QAnon-tinged Sound of Freedom — a dynamic that is mirrored in music with the undertones of racial violence in Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” lifting the song to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 as Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, a loving tribute to Black queer culture, breaks records around the world.

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Beyoncé’s seismic tour (in support of her Billboard 200-topping 2022 album of the same name) explicitly highlights, uplifts, and centers the lives and cultural contributions of the ballroom scene, a community anchored by Black and brown queer folk — the very people songs like “Small Town” seem to be railing against. It expands Renaissance’s explorations of the expanse of dance music and ballroom culture into a nearly three-hour multi-act spectacle. With the inimitable Kevin Jz Prodigy serving as the tour’s guiding voice, the Renaissance Tour stands in complete defiance of the recent tide of anti-LGBTQIA+ attitudes and legislation that has swept the country, immersing both creator and observer in the unadulterated freedom of ballroom.

Having kicked off on May 10 in Stockholm, Sweden, the Renaissance World Tour touched down in Las Vegas, Nevada for two shows at Allegiant Stadium on August 26 and 27. On Sunday night (Aug. 27), the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the educational arm of the nation’s largest LGBTQIA+ civil rights organization, hosted the first-ever Equality Ball in association with Beeline Productions and the Shady Gang, with support from Beyoncé’s BeyGOOD Foundation.

“This is a beautiful manifestation,” gushes Human Rights Campaign president, Kelley Robinson. “The fact that it came together this year means so much, because not only has this been a vision that [we] wanted to manifest, but also we’re sitting in a state of emergency right now.”

On Sunday night, The Equality Ball — which Robinson says was the result of the HRC’s partnership with Lena Giroux Zakalik, executive producer for Beeline Productions, and Carlos Basquiat, a dancer and choreographer on the Renaissance World Tour — tackled the pain of death and grief as much as it celebrated the grandeur of ballroom culture. In fact, the Equality Ball served as a hopeful bookend to a month that began in the shadow of the tragic murder of O’Shae Sibley, a Black queer dancer who was attacked with a barrage of homophobic slurs before being killed by a 17-year-old for vogueing to a track from Beyoncé’s Renaissance album.

“Jonty, Yvette [Noel-Schure’s] basically adopted son, was killed,” Robinson says. “One in five of every hate crime is motivated by anti-LGTBQ+ bias, and, at the same time, we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of anti-LGTBQ+ bills that are moving forward in states every day. This was a moment where we needed to not only celebrate the Black queer experience, but [also] put it on center stage.”

Given that Las Vegas lacks the ballroom roots of New York City and the house music roots of Chicago, the city may initially seem like a curious choice to host the Equality Ball. Nonetheless, “we have to be here,” stresses Robinson. “We’re here today in the state that’s gonna be consequential in the 2024 election. We have to understand that for us to be able to celebrate inside that building, to be able to live our fullest and most, most authentic lives, we have to make sure we got laws and policy that protect us on the outside [too].”

Like with nearly every other corner of the Black experience, streaks of death mark the ballroom community at every turn — a fact that performers at Sunday night’s Equality Ball did not shy away from. The troupe Madame Arthur, one of the pre-ball performers, delivered a deeply moving cover of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” that decreased the tempo of the original and featured lyrics rewritten to reflect and uplift the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been senselessly lost to anti-LGBTQIA+ violence.

The history of Madame Arthur – the drag cabaret venue the performance group is named after, which opened in 1946, currently features a troupe of queer artists — added an extra layer of nuance to their performance, a reminder that the fight for total LGBTQIA+ liberation has been roaring for decades on end. “[Ballroom] comes from a really harsh culture. It was birthed out of negativity, to keep it honest. People were getting kicked out of their houses and shunned by their parents,” says Stephanie “Packrat” Whitfield, one of the executive producers of the Equality Ball. “So to make a community, it’s like a phoenix rising from the ashes, right? Everything was against us, and we made this beautiful thing out of nowhere.”

For a culture that loses so many influential movers and shakers before they have a chance to bask in the glory of their own accomplishments, the Equality Ball allowed elders in the ballroom scene to enjoy a night of genuine revelry. Shannon Balenciaga, Overall Mother of the House of Balenciaga, and Stasha Garçon, Iconic Overall godmother of the House of Garçon, shared a good-hearted battle as they both walked the runway during a series of appearances from ballroom icons before the ball formally commenced. Kevin Jz Prodigy and Kevin Aviance, whose voices have provided a key backbone to both the Renaissance album and tour, performed throughout the night, with Prodigy emceeing a healthy chunk of the ball.

In addition, the judges panel for the ball’s five main categories included impactful ballroom figures such as Jack Mizrahi, Dashaun Wesley, Twiggy Pucci Garçon, Ricky Holman and Jennifer Barnes-Balenciaga. The night’s focus on pillars of the ballroom community instead of on the celebrity of Beyoncé emphasized the overarching goal of the Equality Ball — to capture the minds and attention of those who many have only been exposed to ballroom culture through entertainment media, and invite them into an authentic representation of the culture and the fight to keep it safe, preserved, and alive.

“With this Equality Ball, we’ve been trying to educate,” says Whitfield. “We have educational moments throughout the entire event where people can learn about ballroom, because it’s very secretive. We don’t let everybody in, because we are safe.”

While Beyoncé tapped a wide range of Black queer collaborators for Renaissance and its accompanying tour, such as Honey Dijon and DJ Mike Q, one of the biggest challenges with celebrity allyship is toeing the fine line between selflessly uplifting a marginalized community and unintentionally dominating that spotlight. Star power the size of Beyoncé’s rarely dims enough to completely disappear. But the “Break My Soul” singer was far from the focal part on Sunday night. Sure, her tour film crew and dancers — Honey Balenciaga and Les Twins, among them — were in attendance, but the Equality Ball did not buckle under the weight of her celebrity. In fact, most of Beyoncé’s involvement happened behind the scenes through her BeyGOOD charity foundation. Robinson recalls a phone call with BeyGOOD executive director Ivy McGregor, Carlos Basquiat, Zakalik and Whitfield “a week after Jonty was murdered, maybe two weeks after O’Shae was murdered.”

“It was about us sharing our individual experiences,” she reflects. “But it was also about this broader context of what it means for Black and queer folks who are fundamentally defining the culture right now to also have our lives stolen by doing what is necessary to be ourselves.”

Even though the journey towards the Equality Ball began several years before anyone heard a single note of Renaissance, Whitfield reveals that it was only at the “last minute” that everything came together. “It always fell through because people are still getting to know ballroom, and what it really means and how to represent that to the world,” she says. “Woo, I’m getting teary-eyed just talking about it.”

Sunday night was a special one for Whitfield. She and Carlos Basquiat not only got to take in the brilliant ball they co-executive produced, but they also got to debut their new kiki house, the Kiki House of FuBu. “It took us a really long time to find the right people to build the community to raise funding,” notes Whitfield. “That’s one thing in the ballroom community is that we are people from low-income housing, low-income communities. So to bring Black and brown people from all gender expressions and sexualities, it’s always a journey. It was a long road of seven years.”

In addition to the highly entertaining ball, The Human Rights Campaign also offered countless educational resources at the Equality Ball, including HIV testing, voter registration, and direct access to information about local LGBTQ+ programs and initiatives. Events like the Equality Ball are tangible manifestations of celebrity allyship, a mode of support that can often feel surface-level and exploitative. For an album with influences as specific as Renaissance, notions of support simply could not stop with the music. “We love y’all watching Pose and Legendary, but we also want y’all to come outside and support!” proclaimed Whitfield at the start of the night.

Renaissance — along with Pose, the Emmy-winning FX drama series, and Legendary, a ballroom-themed Max reality competition series — is one of the most prominent works of art in a late-2010s wave of Black queer-inspired pieces of entertainment. “Honestly, it was like ‘Finally!” That’s how I felt [when Renaissance dropped],” says Whitfield. “Some of us have been in ballroom for years and we see everyone use what we do and never give us recognition. There’s a lot of appropriation. So, while they’re elevating, we’re still on the ground floor and underneath the floor, and it’s very unfair.” With Renaissance, however, Beyoncé tapped ballroom icons, Black queer dance music producers and writers and hired tour dancers who “not only have put in the work in the ballroom community, but also have that skill to be onstage and empower a whole generation of new beings,” says Whitfield.

Converting consumers to steadfast supporters of the ballroom scene and Black queer liberation is a testy task, especially when so much of the struggle takes place within the joint vacuum of celebrity allyship and capitalism. Nevertheless, the Equality Ball shines as a beacon of hope. “We love everybody loving the album, but are you really coming to help us?” poses Whitfield. “It’s one thing to help the three or four of us that are onstage, it’s another thing to come into our community and learn about our culture.”

As BeyGOOD’s involvement in the Ball demonstrates, finding the humility to humble yourself and research and learn about a culture that is not yours is imperative to establishing a foundation for genuine, unwavering support. “We still have so many people that are homeless and are fighting for survival on a daily basis,” she stresses. “So, to have people really come in and support our community without just taking up space, but really taking up an active space of learning is what’s important.”

“A lot of people wanna be on the floor now,” she continues. “But you can be on the floor, if you learn the history and respect the pioneers that have laid down their lives for us to be here tonight.”