The Love Ball offers the first sustained historical study of the emergence of house-structured ballroom culture, a now-global Black queer and trans expressive tradition. Drawing on thirty-five oral histories conducted over eight years, extensive original archival materials, and my own experience as a ballroom participant who has walked, won, and organized balls, the project reconstructs how Black and Latine trans and queer youth transformed conditions of urban austerity, racialized policing, and the HIV/AIDS crisis into new structures of kinship, creativity, and survival known as “houses.”

Rather than framing ballroom through voguing alone or through the interpretive limits of the 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning, The Love Ball traces ballroom’s development across a twenty-year period, from its formation in Harlem during the 1970s to its transformation amid the AIDS crisis of the long 1980s and early 1990s. The project situates ballroom as a foundational site of U.S. trans expressive culture and Black queer worldmaking, foregrounding the intellectual labor of its pioneers—particularly femme queens, Black women assigned male at birth who cultivated balls as spaces of gender experimentation, aesthetic innovation, and collective care in the absence of institutional support.

The book intervenes in trans studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies by centering the raced and classed vernaculars through which ballroom gender was produced. Rather than tracing trans history through visibility or identity, I analyze how Black and Latine trans and queer people fashioned gender through collective labor, improvisation under constraint, and mutual dependence within racialized economies of scarcity. By recovering categories such as femme queenas historically situated forms of worldmaking, The Love Ball reframes trans embodiment as collaboratively produced and embedded within specific social and economic conditions.

The project also extends feminist theories of social reproduction and political economy by theorizing ballroom houses as kinship systems that complicate liberal narratives of “chosen family.” Rather than emerging solely from exile or rejection, ballroom houses reflect longer traditions of Black kinship elasticity, mutual aid, and care forged under conditions of dispossession. Finally, The Love Ball examines how documentary and archival forms mediate ballroom’s political economy, translating practices of labor, care, and survival into aesthetic legibility while obscuring the material infrastructures that sustain them.

To preserve and circulate this history, I created an open-source archive of oral histories, photographs, and ephemera housed at New York University's Hemispheric Institute. By engaging ballroom pioneers’ life narratives as theories-in-motion, The Love Ball positions ballroom culture not as a subcultural footnote but as a primary archive for understanding Black trans life, kinship, and creativity under constraint.