The Peabody Ballroom Experience

Helping Us To Recall the Past and Build a Future

The purpose of ballroom is to truly love who you are as a black and brown, queer or trans person. It’s also a space where you are challenged to grow. — Janol Balenciaga

In this post, we highlight our colleagues at Johns Hopkins who have pioneered a commitment to hard histories and to different futures, The Peabody Ballroom Experience. Coordinated by JHU’s Dr. Joseph Plaster and “Legends and Icons from Baltimore’s ballroom scene,” this project engages in the past, present, and future of JHU’s connections to “a nearly century-old performance-based culture composed primarily of gay, lesbian, transgender, and gender non-conforming people of color.” Follow them and you will discover how workshops in archival research and Vogue, film production, oral histories, and ball competitions tell the story of where , queer members of the JHU and Baltimore communities, have been together and where a future might take all of us.

Today, JHU’s Peabody Library is just a more recent venue for Baltimore’s ballroom culture, which originated back in the 1890s. Most interesting for us at Hard Histories is how our work on race and racism intersects with work that recovers the past of ballroom culture on the pages of the Baltimore Afro American. There, you can explore coverage of the city’s drag balls, “written during the “pansy craze,” a period in the late 1920s and 1930s during which sexually non-normative clubs and performers (known as pansies) experienced a surge in popularity in the United States.” Curators at the Peabody Ballroom Experience also caution us to take care with these sources which “demeaned and misgendered ball performers,” demanding that we regard them critically and with a keen eye for the writers’ biases.

Hold the date: April 15, 2023. The Peabody Ballroom Experience will present “Baltimore Beautiful Symbols: An Homage to Ballroom Royalty,” featuring a performance by Marquis Revlon and the Peabody Dance Department. We will see you there.

At Hard Histories at Hopkins, we are shaken by news of last weekend’s heinous killings at Club Q in Colorado Springs and we stand with the LGBTQ+ lab members among us and also with those who are our loved ones — friends, colleagues, classmates, neighbours, family, and more — in outrage and in love. Thank you to Dr. Plaster and all his collaborators for holding a space for us that is loving, brave, and beautiful.

MSJ.