The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Dorian Corey sits relaxed in a dim lit room, pasting foundation into the cracks in his face. Green boas hang draped from walls and a stuffed owl perches moodily with its back to the camera as Corey discusses preparations for tonight's drag ball. "They're very intense affairs but I guess that's what makes them fun," purrs the veteran drag queen, applying make-up in a shaving mirror. "Like a good movie... if there's no emotion you don't enjoy it."

Extending Corey's logic, Paris Is Burning is a fantastic movie. A besotted exploration of the black and Latino drag subculture of late-eighties New York, the film harnesses all its emotion behind a lacquer of artifice maintained by the ironic pedantry that surrounds each ball. For Harlem's gay 'children' it's all about perfecting a look that fits within one of the balls' apparently endless sub-categories - 'Luscious Body', 'Executive Realness', 'Winter Sportswear', 'Butch Queen First Time In Drags At A Ball'. The aim in many of the categories is to appear as 'real' as you can while on parade. If the panel of judges think you could blend in with real-life executives, even though you're sleeping under Harlem Pier and shoplifted your outfit from a department store uptown, you've a chance at hauling off a farcically proportioned trophy.

It's not all about mimicking The Norms, though. The subculture has an argot all its own - each 'child' is inducted into a 'house'. Described variously as a "family" and a "gay street gang", some of the 1990 film's best footage follows the various houses mincing about the streets of Manhattan, confident of their family's protection. That sense of protection seeps into the scene's slang and rituals. When brushing up against taunting straights, each queen is equipped with a rehearsed 'reading', a bitchy patter designed to outwit or win over street hecklers depending on the intensity of their distaste. As explained, though, 'readings' are fairly ineffectual when it's queen vs. queen; everyone's black and everyone's queer, so insults are often reflected. The solution is 'vogueing', its derisory, superior poses the one element of the demimonde that went overground courtesy of the Madonna single. The end of the film documents the rise of vogueing and its hero Willi Ninja while the scene's foundation begins to smear in the face of AIDS.