The queerest and most deformed side
I am thirty-nine years old and was born in Mexico City (my parents had to leave Argentina during the military dictatorship). I lived all my life in Argentina. I studied Biological Sciences at the UBA for three years. At that time we had a group with which we gave school support classes in the villa [slum] behind Ciudad Universitaria. There was a connection between the academic-middle class-white and the transvestites, trans, queers, and cartoneras who lived there. That lasted a year and a half, it was a short experience, but it marked me -I was twenty-one years old-. I had companions with a background in fieldwork in Villa 31 who taught us the tools of Pablo Freire and others. The gay villa [slum] was a space where many transvestites, transsexuals, queers and straight cartoneros lived who had their families there. It was a terrible place with no electricity or drinking water. They had a terrible time in that post-2001 context. What we did was to try to listen: to see what they needed. Later I studied history at Puán for almost three years, but I found it overwhelming and left.
At the same time, when I was twenty years old I started doing events and movements related to LGBT culture and what is now called dissidence. I was part of Espacio resaca, a post-2001 collective. It was an anti-capitalist sexual revolution. We had an anti-system agenda and participated in piquetero movements. There I met people with whom we became comrades and friends, like Diana Sacayán, Marlene Wayar, and many lesbian, gay, and queer activists.
One of the axes of our militancy was to generate meeting places different from those that existed at that time for our community. We did not feel part of the gay clubs in 2002, and 2003. We started to create queer-punk, spaces where there could be hardcore bands, discussions of all kinds, and areas to dance and move our bodies. That was our refuge in clandestine places. That was the beginning.
Over time, the events became my life and my work. I became what today would be a cultural manager -at that time, those terms were not used-, a DJ and producer. I worked for more than a decade in the Eyeliner party, a massive party where more than a thousand people went every weekend from the LGBTQ+ community. Voguing and ballroom culture came into my life during a solid transition. The Eyeliner had lost its raison d’être. Argentina was transformed not only by the Gender Identity and Marriage Law but also by society’s mutation. And what used to be liberating became armor. I thought creating a space where people could create freely and live their fantasies and identities in a safer place was important. To build queer spaces and new femininities, not even spaces understood as feminine or masculine, but looking for something more deformed.
Personally, voguing gave me the freedom to play with my queer and deformed side. I’ve been openly queer for years, but this opened the doors for me to dance and play with my body from another place. When I started with the Turbo parties, many people told me: “Why are you going to do a space with house music? That’s for old faggots”. “Ball doesn’t exist here; it won’t work.” I took elements from the ballroom culture that attracted me and that didn’t exist here. I started to build a performative space in which we took dance as the axis: dance as a liberating element. It had less to do with the ballroom culture regarding colonized and hegemonic model replication.
As a producer, I take care of the diffusion of the Turbo parties -because although there were dates with eight hundred people, it is a self-managed enterprise of the relations with the clubs. I work as a curator, coordinating with the hosts,with the DJ team and reading the space to see what is good and what is not. As a DJ, during the two hours I’m there, I just want to connect with the people on the dance floor to have that dialogue. It’s the most beautiful thing about my job and I do it for pure pleasure: to see if they’re dancing or what they’re dancing to, to play with the music.
Besides, I’ve been making my own beats for the last couple of years. In the pandemic, I dedicated myself especially to that. Since I couldn’t be on a dancefloor, I dedicated myself to producing.
Every dance is political
Every dance is political. Every dance is political. Putting your body in motion after being lined up for a week working is political. It doesn’t matter if you are going to dance reggaeton or freestyle; dancing in itself is liberating and in our society, it is a political element. In the language of vogue and ballroom culture – built first in New York, then in Paris, and then in Latin America – the emancipation of the body has been worked on and prioritized.
The first Turbo party was around 2016 and was called Turbo Tauro. We generated identity and community, but we focused the message on the freedom that dance generates. We delimited and put the axis that no males could come; it was a space for queers, trans and femininities, and that’s a huge limit. What DJ Analog and I thought was key was to create a space to dance. Our manifestos always raised the need to build a safe space. A person with a non-hegemonic identity – and I’m not just talking about LGBTQ+ identities, but anyone who breaks with the conception of white hegemonic identity – is constantly exposed to violence. That’s why it was essential to generate a safe space and that’s why we developed so many protocols so that people could feel comfortable and could come and talk to us in any situation.
I felt it was necessary to develop queerness and break with what would now be called “old masculinities.” We were playing with the house music culture, with the fag library. A place where you could fag freely; that was the fun of the space. Then came the development of our ballroom.
In Argentina, there was no ballroom. Now, the ball is a culture with a life of its own. There are houses, spaces that dispute territories, and symbolic powers, and now the ball has its place beyond the Turbo parties. Within the movement, we discussed the hegemonic bodies and practices such as passing (where the one who passes for cis wins), an element of the ballroom culture that, for me, is atrocious.
La Confitería was an iconic space for us. You would go up a little staircase and enter that ballroom, which was a ballroom, but not one of the ballroom culture, but of a 50’s dance: a bit decadent, as Argentina is. And you would find a lot of people living the fantasy. We always had a slogan or a fantasy to carry out.
There were two types of events. On the one hand, the ballroom itself, which was on Sunday afternoons, was where the categories were, where we carried out all the paraphernalia, and where we also read what a ball was. On the other hand, there was the space of the maricoteca. The maricoteca was a place where you were in communion with many people. I always think of that space from an almost ceremonial point of view, where the DJ is somehow a pontiff. The pontiff is the Christian priest who is a bridge between the divine and the earthly. It sounds exaggerated, but we were in the middle of the party, choosing what music to play and what climate to develop with others who made you enter a fantasy.
We always worked on the luxury theme, something very present in the ballroom culture. Replicating the opulence of the whites that the black and Latin marginalities can’t live because they don’t have the resources. If we make them our own, at that moment, we are royalty. A feigned arrogance; that was the party’s climate and spirit. And playing with house music, the alma mater of the maricoteca. House music is black music with soul, with a chorus in the middle of the beats – it is not the techno of pills, square and without spirit.
Within the ballroom culture, there are categories and hierarchies. A jury that knows and has legitimacy given by a community defines right and wrong, with the beautiful power to provide legitimacy to someone in their movement or expression and the terrible power to destroy it. I deeply love ballroom culture but see these limitations, so I claim the maricoteca space, where everything is more unrestricted. Ballroom culture is impressive but reproduces the system’s logic and power. We have to be cautious not to replicate what we criticize.
The houses are already vertical and every time there were attempts to make them more horizontal and to generate spaces to discuss in an assembly way, a different descent came. The houses are patriarchal -this is controversial and the voguers will kill me- but why do I say this? Because there is a mother, there is a father; sometimes there is an over grandfather. That is, they are vertical structures, either by age, by experience, by ability to dance or to ride or to trick. Many voguers think they are horizontal and I hope that’s the case. I wholeheartedly hope so.
What I can read from quite hostile experiences that I lived close up is that sometimes it is a vertical structure with many practices that are not liberating. They reproduce the system and take it to a level of violence that I don’t recommend to anyone. That, plus the cancellation culture, seems the perfect combo for not belonging to a movement like this: ejecting, violent. You have to be cautious and be careful not to fall into that. There are also wonderful experiences. I know Andy Andino’s house, which is a great space. There are new spaces, like Laurent’s house, which is fantastic.
Bringing faggotry to the streets
As Latin Americans, we must understand that we live in a context that many call “neo-colonialism.” We have independent governments, but we are tied hand and foot at an economic level. For as long as I can remember, there have been cyclical crises in Argentina, and we have gone through many revolts and social outbursts because the economic situation is very complicated. And it is a bubble to pretend that by replicating the ballroom culture of the United States in a place in the Palermo neighborhood we would be living elsewhere.
The ball will inevitably take to the streets. In fact, there have been exciting manifestations. Laurent Tropicalia was one of the hosts of Turbo and he also has his own house, House Tropicalia. Laurent experienced a classic, terrible case of homophobia with a neighbor who harassed him. The voguers organized a demonstration, danced at the house door, and thus got a response. So the ball is meat. The compañeras of the ball in Mexico had been doing it since before. Now, some incredible images are circulating of some voguers voguing to the police in Colombia. It has a powerful potential to put the body and take faggots to the streets. In the political jargon in 2002, 2003, and 2004, we called it “making visibility”: we went with LGBT flags, and sometimes we went riding.
The ball, indeed, comes from the margins in the United States. But here we are, traversed by colonization and the big companies selling us what it is like to be queer. There is a cultural organization of these products and it attracts marginalized people. No matter how much they put a trans person in their products, they still sell them. So there is cultural colonization and you have to see how it arrives. Suddenly, some kids see that, buy that movie and that fantasy and go into a house thinking they are in Brooklyn in the late 90’s, which is inaccurate.
Recently, a young person who belongs to the brown identity collective -anyone who is not white and read as white is being racialized and they put it into words and are developing it as an activism- wrote to me. She is also a voguer and asked me to share one of my lists, which includes, for example, Las Culisueltas. In my label, Tropikinky Records, we work with Dj Crast, producer of Las Culisueltas, who was also a partner of Eyeliner. We are looking not to work with exogenous elements but to mix vogue elements with our features. Our identity is there, and it would be a mistake to lose it, as many people do to resemble, reproduce and belong to an international house, which complies with dissident people’s mandates but is not from here.
The Ball,voguers and urban dances
There is a link between ball and voguers and other urban dances such as twerk. If we were purists of the ballroom culture, there are categories that we would not have been able to make. We had to have this discussion, the first one about freestyle. In ballroom culture, there is no freestyle; there are three types of ball: old way, new way, and vogue fem. Then there are the categories of beginners or not. But there is no freestyle. Freestyle is an invention of ours that had to do with the Turbo.
The motto of the Turbo was “dancing liberates,” a phrase that I have tattooed on my arm. That was the important thing. So, we were looking for a space where it was difficult to evaluate, focusing instead on the collective, which is much more enriching. Within freestyle, people from other disciplines, such as hip-hop, came. The music I played was super random, which was fantastic because they could not know what would be there. On the other hand, some people did twerk, people who danced turreo -which is frowned upon but is something local that mixes reggaeton and cumbia, which is the essence of the neighborhood.
Urban dances had a boom from social networks because the networks gave many people visibility. Many voguers became more professional, and based on their skills, they learned to create their own spaces to give classes outside of dance as an institution -which is often very exclusive-. There is a fantastic dancer who is more than a voguer and has a dance studio in Laferrere. His name is Emiliano Medina and he does the waacking. He is fat and has no space in the classical academy. He weighs more than 120 kilos. Certain corporalities are left out of classical dance, even if there is a positive intentionality from more progressive people.
Dancing is not an inheritance of young people, skinny people, or cis people. Any corporeality can exercise movement; the issue is to find a way to have a space and not a secondary place, a place that is frowned upon or an area of pity. Gerontophobia, transphobia, and fatphobia are present throughout our society and are very strong in the dance field.
In the context of alienation in which we are, which is getting worse and worse, dance is an obligation to liberate the body. We are traversed by many mandates and social networks that force us to be in different ways. Movement is significant and irreplaceable. The communion with others dancing in person and not through the internet is irreplaceable. It is something even mystical. What kind of dance is necessary at this time? Behind every formalization comes a stylization and a unique aesthetic beauty with different canons. But there is also the trap of limitation. So what there has to be is more freestyle. Let the most deformed dance be possible for all bodies and ages. That is what I perceive and would like to generate: not a Turbo anymore, a post-persona party outside what we consider established with more freedom. I don’t know if we need a turreo party or a ball to develop. No: let there be free dancing, that’s the best, always!