How Do I Look, the long-awaited documentary celebrating the 35-year-old Harlem "Ball" culture, makes its debut this month--and proves itself worth the wait. In addition to educating viewers on this predominantly gay tradition, the film also enlightens them on inner-city performing arts, HIV outreach and prevention, “house” family values, gay heritage and issues of gender identity. By capturing our LGBT artistic and social history, it provides us all with the opportunity to promote and celebrate our heritage, culture and arts. In 1983, gay filmmaker Wolfgang Busch immigrated from Heppenheim, Germany to Newport News, Virginia in the United States. He eventually settled in NYC where he worked as sound and light engineer; and then as freelance videographer for live rock music events.

From 1990 until 2000, he produced the weekly public access TV show New York New Rock, supporting many communities such as the disabled, the GLBT community, arts, sports, theater, politics and fashion. It was around this time that Wolfgang began to film the then underground, inner-city events known to insiders as the “ballroom scene” and/or “vouging." The sheer volume of performance and interview footage he has filmed over the years for How Do I Look is staggering.

One of the most sought-after live-in-concert video cameramen in NYC, Busch can shoot an event with only one video camera and make it look like three were used. His uncanny ability to always catch the best onstage moment in his lens, his instantaneous sense for “visual editing on-the-fly,” and his natural feel for the rhythm of music all combine to make him the perfect filmmaker to capture such an energetic and spontaneous phenomenon as what occurs on the crazed catwalk during a ballroom competion event.

The worldwide popularity of the ballroom scene first hit its peek in the early 1990s with Madonna's hit single and ubiquitous video "Vogue," in 1990, and continued on through Jennie Livingston's 1991 documentary Paris is Burning. This first-of-its-kind film featured “stars” from the legendary drag queen “houses,” whose urban center “balls” occurred regularly in the 1980's. The houses were comprised of “families” of gay men organized and run by "mothers" or "fathers" who oversaw their "children."

They offered a socially protective and artistically nurturing environment for creative inner-city gay and transgender youth who often had nowhere else to go.

Veritable foster-home fantasy-factories for those who could only dream of fame, social status and stardom, many houses were named after high-fashion designers who in reality existed a universe away. Legendary “houses” like Givenchy, Versace, Mugler, Cavalli, Moschino, Bizarre, Balenciaga and Prestige offered a safe refuge where “families” could design the clothes, create the moves and ultimately enable the absolutely fabulous/vicarious world of their dreams to come into being.

I can remember seeing the startling Paris is Burning and being struck by the fact that an inner-city subculture so impoverished, so disenfranchised from mainstream America, so bedeviled by homophobia, drugs, prostitution and AIDS, could rise up and bring their dream world of fabulousness to life--even if only as some kind of wishful play-acted hallucination.

If ever there was a testimony to the indomitable ability of the human spirit to persevere and even thrive beyond all odds, it was evident in the lives of these mostly gay and transgender men, whose vision and sheer will transformed an otherwise typical bohemian drag queen existence into a brand new hyper-creative art form.

Page 1 / 2 - Next