I was watching the documentary "Paris Is Burning."  Incredible to witness the raw orphaned desire for belonging of a marginalized culture, at the same time it's brilliant, glamorous unappreciated creativity.  The film encompasses the grit of the 80s with its unsafe streets juxtaposed with glorified high materialism, fetishizing wealth,large cold modernist apartments, the brands and outfits of class, and this world that the young gay people in the film are barred from.  They run away at 13 or 14 and become hustlers.  A world I can't fathom, one where childhood and the security of parents standing in an unambiguous role of protection, one where the people we have sex with or those we work with those we befriend also become our parents.  The pathless longing for warmth, acceptance, and the markers of what growing up in a family is, without knowing why you want it or what.  These kids would be absorbed into the competitive, creative, glamour imitating circles of the "houses" of drag balls.  They would find an anchor in slightly older people who are gay.  Motherless, but talented, creative, competitive, fiery and full of a great vibrant subculture.  They craved to be appreciated, part of the establishment, to come out on top, to be in a modernist mansion away from New York and the windows facing on other projects, dark forest puce colored rooms with peeling wallpaper and cut outs of models.  Glamor of the kind mainstream and accepted on television varnished was fetishized by the unappreciated, the artists whose edge and burning creative competition, their society and the ways to hone their craft, would come from being on the sidelines and longing to be in the forefront.  I have always been surprised at the way gay men fetishize the outer varnish of aristocratic wealth, the style, glamor, and class which is the exoskeleton of what is left of the appropriate courtesies and rituals of the born and bred elite.  Style and class have become the husks, easily cast off, of the proper obligation of the aristocratic classes, once a stuffy burden that America fought to remove, yet style, the je ne sais quoi of class and the muse-like appearance of beauty that says nothing for itself is precisely what makes wealth and its trappings compelling, style is the mythology of wealth, class is the rudiment of meet and proper noblesse oblige. Just as the feathers, outer garments of camp, mannerisms, and make up are the outer markers of drama and theater.. lights and glitter are the arrows and clues that point to the substance of the show about to begin, yet the lights, the costumes, the theater make up "the costumes, the scenery, the make up, the props" carry the legacy of the golden age of traditional theater and vaudeville before it, the plot, the tight comedic lines, these are what we associate with the capital T Grand Theater.  The old diva theatrical principles with their aura of strength, drama, and attitude are behavioral examples and their confidence cues us to expect the substance and beauty of a great performance, a legendary performance that sets us in a legendary time.  Let's not forget that the lifeblood of the theater and actors is one of vanity, closeness with a camera and nakedness in front of it, familial intimacy with a crowd, an audience that feeds, validates with applause, and creates a reciprocal relationship in the actor's mind that is not in the audience.  What feeds the actor is substantial, is emotional, full of depth, the study of acting, the repartee and interrelationship with the audience, the set up, the stage, the world they live in at that moment is their lens on life.  And this is what produces the veneer, the veneer of camp, glamor, lights, sparkles, the strength and beauty of the diva principal from a long line of diva principals.  The promise of a beautiful, golden show can be more beautiful than the show.  Is this what gay men love and idolize in the theater, in fashion, the style of the rich, and the many creative arts?  The balls are replete with glitz as well as the ethos of battle, which is competition, specifically, competing group prowess.  What do the competitors have prowess at?  Both the silver veneer of glamor that calls up so many associations of class, taste, aristocracy if they are imitating models, drama, intensity, theatricality if they consider themselves to be poor versions of their favorite celluloid screen actresses.  The beauty of Hollywood and the beauty of fashion maintains itself as a hologram, the promise of transcendent art based on the idyll of unadulterated glamor that it sells.  Marilyn was very much a hologram of herself, a different woman on the inside, yet one who smiled orgasmically, whose gown sparkled in the white gentle light of the celluloid old world cameras, her veneer took the breath away because, like that of Gilda, it lived on its own. The veneer was the peerless Platonic ideal of Hollywood beauty.  And so it wouldn't die.  Regardless of who Marilyn was on the inside.  Much like advertising, the aspect of glamor, carefully filtered and produced, is a come on and promise of the more immediate life, the more beautiful life, the better life, regardless of what video camera tricks or illusions of makeup it took to produce it.  The muse lives on in distance, uniformity of the veneer, we can take on a glimmering husk of it when we dress like that, when we embody ourselves with the confidence, sharpness, and pain of glamor.  Which indicates struggle inside, fragility and vulnerability, in perpetuating the art of using one's body and personality to appear as an art and canvas for the idea of glamor.  Thus, beautiful pained people in this movie, the most beautiful and poignant being Venus a pail, thin charismatic shade were the most poignant because they would be sacrificed to their cult legend.  The mix of being shut out and unwanted by a society that values mainstream wealth, cobbling together a family with danger sex and drugs in the mix, and wanting that mainstream recognition despite creating a community that feeds on the glamor of insular fame created this delicate art, this scene that soon people would not turn away from.  I don't think this sort of dance, creative fecundity, and attitude can be produced in any other pressure cooker.
If they grew up differently, they would be me, craving for the intensity of a fresh venue, creating problems in their middle class environment like Goth Jenna Malone.

The drag ball is a show of prowess and a dance.  It is a competitive, driven group effort and the drive is toward art, a personal art that is a resurrection of the veneer of glamor worshiped in various forms of art for mainstream consumption such as fashion and movies.

I don't think they could be satisfied if they grew up in what they perceived as the majority, and their creativity would not be as immediate or their talent or drive as incisive.  The possibility of living a passable life that does not leave a wound could consign them to mediocrity, that of the accountants and collegiate assessors who would never be confident in their art, would consume, spend "quality time," and not create.  I think that sacrificing for the art of living a good life, of only being one's ow art, of one's children or one's day job being one's own art, precludes sacrificing one's happiness to create a tangible product and form of art.  Which requires full attention.  Which will leave varying intensity.  Which requires an unopened unhealed wound that leaves one to the observation of extreme states as well as their fellow man.  We forfeit a life in art when we focus on "self help," when we try for the art and science of making oneself happy.  But, I'm not convinced at all that the person producing art is not happy.  They may not be happy ever due to the requirement to produce be the vessel empty the vessel.  But, the person who does not create anything will never know what it is like to be an empty vessel.

I think that focusing on an artfully lived life or going for "self help" if you do not have diagnosable problems is a mistake.  I think that turning one's monomania inward on oneself does not produce a happy life.  Regardless of whether or not we work hours and hours on the treadmill of a promised promotion or salary raise.  It becomes disturbing to be a rat on a treadmill when we realize that we are compromising our values and replacing our goal track for someone else's.  The discomfort comes when we have changed our lives past the point that it suits our own needs.  When we become a cog in the wheel of what a job requires, which is service and utility to the organism you are a part of, as great as possible of utility with evolving self determining ways of being more useful, we forget that we and the job have a reciprocal relationship, or at least we have a reciprocal relationship with ourselves.  When the job begins to dictate how we live to a point of discomfort, this is when we feel controlled, when our highest goals become not our own.  We stay up later than we like to, we get up earlier than we like to, in the service of working more than we like to and as a result we are unsatisfied to sacrifice our base line requirements for the way we want to live (for instance, eating fresh food at dinner or going outside for lunch) to increase yield and profit margin, to wholly align our mindset with the organism we are in service to.  This is when we reassess.

Anyway, the kids in the movie experience privation, lack of family roots, danger, and marginalization.  They are starved of family and the community of people they know through that.  They make their own family.  They do not romanticize 80s New York and its danger the way I do.  They see it as a place to get through and get by and one where they are shut out of the most glamorous tidbits, where they are forced to subsist on a lack of success despite their outstanding talent, competitive spirit and passion.  I am still amazed at the gay fetishization of glamor and the trappings of class.  The allure of fashion is in the ineffable quality of glamor and class, the allure of theater is not in its words and substance, but in its drama, theatricality, and camp.  I see the trappings of bohemia and the quite tragedy that makes it so beautiful, I see a boiling subculture I missed.  I find their perspective and world unbelievably seductive, beautiful, and torn much like Candy Darling, and find the world of straight men and people around me dull and stentorian, their insistence on the "banality of evil" unless it's superhero vs supervillain.  The lack of mystery in their music, the lack of edge in their gore, the lack of sexuality in their prn, simply two barbie like leathery skins grinding up against each other with cartoonish body parts overexposed to the camera like in a fisheye.  How can they find sexuality and mystery in this and not see the sexuality in the husk of glamor, the mailed hologram of the muse, what gay men saw in Gilda flirting for the camera?