Bailey’s text details the ways in which Ballroom culture, through prizing the expression of fluid gender and sexuality, actively forming kinship structures, and ritualizing performance and competition, institutes a space of care, love, competition, labor, critique, worth, and belonging for Black LGBT individuals. Marginalized racially, sexually, and economically, many of Detroit’s Black LGBT people are denied access to multiple spheres, from their religiously regulated and patriarchal “Black communities of origin,” to White queer spaces, economic opportunities, and effective healthcare. Butch Queens Up in Pumps, Bailey’s enthnography of Black LGBT ballroom culture, explores this often controversial and hugely influential performance practice, competitive culture, and kinship community that affirms expressions of non-normative gender and sexuality and enhances the lives of Black LGBT people in the largest – and one of the poorest – American cities with a majority Black population.
What has too often gone unremarked, however, are the ways in which one of Detroit’s most disenfranchised groups – the Black LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) population – has responded with innovation and artistry to such segregation, poverty, and other social conditions that construct Black LGBT lives as inconsequential. The most prominent features of this collapse are what Detroit commentators have called the “deindustrialization, ghettoization, and racialized poverty” that have increasingly marked the city since the 1950s. After enjoying a cultural and economic flowering between World War II and the Civil Rights Movement, Detroit has crumbled, so the story goes, into dilapidation and decay.