Twenty-two-year-old Pembroke Pines student Suji Harper agrees. She's new to the scene and picked up her first trophy at the Jingle Ball walking the Butch Girl Realness category. Harper is a far cry from a supermodel. She's a big black girl with a combed-back flattop. She wears blue jeans and a denim jacket and walked at the ball with a patient swagger, as if sizing up the hollering crowd. But the toughness she conjures for the show drops away when she leaves the floor. Harper's mother has a hard time accepting her daughter, her only child, as a butch lesbian. But for Harper there is no doubt: She clearly wouldn't be caught dead in frills and dresses.
At a ball Harper can let it all hang loose. "Walking balls means a lot to me," she ruminates. "It means that I can show myself the way I really am and sell myself the way I want to."
Steve Satterwhite
Be anything you want to be while walking the balls, where attitude and realness win trophies
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Infiniti's Liliana hails from Medellín, Colombia, and like many of the ball performers, won't reveal her last name. She has racked up dozens of trophies from her triumphs at balls in New York and South Florida, competing in the Femme Queen Face and Femme Queen Realness categories. There is no way to tell that Liliana, who boasts all the right curves and a flawless complexion, was born with a Y chromosome. She works as a freelance makeup artist and lives her life as a woman full-time. "Femme Queen Realness means working in the day as a woman, and nobody knows you're a man," Liliana explains. "It means going home to meet [a boyfriend's] family, and they can never tell." In the six years she's been living as a woman, Liliana has yet to be discovered. "I'm 150 percent woman; there is nothing that I do in my life that has to do with my being a man."
At 24 years old, Vanessa Mizrahi is one of the New York legends who is settling in South Florida. Her famed reputation in the ballroom scene here stems from her stardom in Greenwich Village's House of Mizrahi. She began her career in the ballroom circuit at age 16 -- two years after surreptitiously beginning hormone therapy with other drag queens in her hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She's seen the competition get tough not only at the dance clubs but also out on the streets. "There are some vicious queens out there. I've seen heads cracked," Mizrahi says from her South Beach apartment. "It's not all just fun and games." She is a survivor, and she relishes telling her story. She expresses herself with the mystique and majesty of a Gloria Swanson -- with a New York accent, of course. Her hair is bleached white, emphasizing cinnamon skin from her CubanPuerto Rican heritage. Since moving to South Beach last summer, Mizrahi has been working with the House of Quest and for support and advocacy groups for transgender youth and prostitutes. She would like to see less stress on competition and more on community. "Do not forget the concept of a house is it's a family," she scolds. "Let's be a family and not go out against each other. Let's help each other out."
The backstabbing and politics of the dance floor were part of the scene that drove top South Beach performer Power Infiniti (whose real name is Dale Wilson) away from the ballroom and into his own performance career. In the mid-'90s he founded Miami's House of Righteous Shade. He and his family began garnering trophies, sparking a challenge to the Lords and Infinitis. The trouble was he began to take the balls too seriously, he says. "I was so competitive that, if I didn't win, I would always start some shit," he remembers. "If one of my kids didn't win, I wouldn't talk to the judges. It used to cause me a lot of stress."
He decided to develop as a transgender performer, not just as a ballroom participant (most recently as a member of the Infinitis). He does not consider himself a drag performer; he doesn't aim to impersonate women like most drag queens. Instead he thinks of himself as a performance artist when he is featured at South Beach's Salvation on Saturday nights. Along with a host of other performers, he is one of the more recognizable personalities in the arena of South Beach nightclubs, often performing in shimmering catsuits with futuristic headdresses glued to his shaved head. But he does attribute much of his success to his ballroom roots. "Ballroom is still so underground, a lot of the circuit boys don't even know about it," he says. "But I've learned to take it on-stage. I bring ballroom to the big parties. It gives me an edge."
His turn judging the children at the Jingle Ball was a homecoming of sorts. He walked the introductory Walk of the Legends at the beginning of the event and waved to a crowd of fresh faces he didn't know but who knew of him. (Most are not old enough to get into the 21-and-over clubs where he performs.) Although spotting Power at a ball these days is a rarity, he says the scene was integral to his development as a gay man and a performer. "I will always live ballroom. When I first came out, it allowed me to have a family atmosphere and exercise my talent," he says. "There's a need for it. As long as you have social outcasting of gays by the so-called normal community, it's gonna affect young adults. They will feel a need to bond."
