[Dialogue] Fifth City Community Center

[Terry Bergdall]

This article appeared in the Sunday Chicago Tribune.  It focuses on a 
weekly event that currently takes place at 3350 W. Jackson in 
Chicago, i.e., the Fifth City Community Center.  Pam and I found it 
interesting and think many of you will, too.  Terry
----------------------------------------------------

<http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0604230255apr23,1,6607513.story?coll=chi-homepagenews-utl>http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0604230255apr23,1,6607513.story?coll=chi-homepagenews-utl 


THE UNDERGROUND BALL

Hundreds of gay black men in Chicago join in a world that is part 
fashion show, part dance-off and part family gathering

By Ofelia Casillas
Chicago Tribune staff reporter

April 23, 2006

Each Sunday at midnight, the ball kids arrive.

Inside an old, windowless ballroom in the 3300 block of West Jackson 
Boulevard, young gay black men form houses that act as fraternities 
or families--often named after fashion designers like the House of 
Escada or House of Balenciaga.

They change into rainbow feathers, gold roller skates or designer 
threads. Then they compete for the best runway strut, most unique 
ensemble, best face or how closely they can resemble business 
executives or city workers.

Or they vogue--popping, locking, dipping and spinning on the dance floor.

When the masquerade is over, winners take home a trophy and some 
cash. But most of all, they come one step closer to becoming a legend 
in the underground ball scene, which flourishes in cities such as 
Chicago and New York, almost invisible to most of the world around it.

In neighborhoods where being gay can be shameful, or even dangerous, 
the ball represents a chance for a small group of young black men to 
step out in over-the-top flamboyance, to act out what many of them 
suppress for the rest of the week.

"The ball is there so they can really experience life completely 
free," said Sunshine, 23, a former ball kid who declined to give his 
real name. "You just entered this land where everyone accepts you."

And, in Chicago, social service agencies have embraced balls as a way 
to find and educate their hard-to-reach demographic about safe sex.

"As far as outreach, if you want to catch 700 kids, you go to a ball 
and they are there," said Francisco Mireles Walker, founder of the 
Youth Pride Center.

Some come for drugs, love or fashion. Arnold Jordan, 23, a postal 
delivery worker, came for the friendship.

In 2003, Jordan lost his father, who raised him, to a heart attack. 
Jordan never felt close to his mother and yearned for a family of 
some sort. So he started a chapter of the House of Ninja in Chicago, 
recruited his friends as members and became the house's Midwest father.

While ball kids feel safe in the rented ballroom, they know not to 
flaunt their lifestyle on the Far South Side. Jordan, called A.J. by 
his friends, used to line the windows of his house on East 92nd 
Street with yellowing newspapers so no one could peer in.

"On the South Side, you don't really feel safe," Jordan said. "I 
don't feel comfortable, and I worry about the welfare of my friends."

At one sleepover in Jordan's house, the House of Ninja rehearsed. 
They twirled, twisted and turned to techno music on the dining room's 
beige carpet.

"Try to do something with the spin," said Sunshine, who coached 
dancers and scored moves on Styrofoam plates.

Before taking a quick trip to a local store, the boys encouraged 
Willie Christian, 23, to tone down his outfit--jeans with a torn back 
pocket, gray blazer, mink shawl. But he refused.

At the store, patrons whispered and stared. Christian laughed and 
played up his femininity, warning Sunshine that soda is bad for the complexion.

They sat at a stoplight next to a car of young men who blared rap 
music and stared. Christian, who runs an after-school program, and 
Sunshine, a college student, drove on past young men wearing do-rags 
on street corners, arms around girlfriends, jeans slung low.

"I'm so happy I don't live here," said Sunshine, his hair in braided pigtails.

"I'd go crazy," Christian responded. "I'd never leave the house."

Hundreds of ball kids feel the same way and seek refuge at the weekly 
parties, which can attract about 200 young men, said Ken Beach, 
co-founder of the party organizer, K.C. Productions.

Once a month, he said, houses host increasingly bigger balls that can 
attract as many as 500. Beach said ball kids come from the more 
feminine faction--in his experience, maybe a third of the young gay 
population. There is tension, he said, between ball kids and some gay 
men who don't approve.

While a tradition of drag balls on Chicago's South Side dates to the 
1930s, the ball scene took its most recent shape in the late 1960s in 
Harlem, according to the Chicago House Alliance.

In the 1980s, the first houses were formed in Chicago. In the years 
that followed, drag balls expanded into competitions with many 
categories that included voguing--a dance craze that gained 
mainstream popularity with Madonna's song in the 1990s. In 1991, 
Chicago held its first real house ball at a nightclub, according to 
the alliance.

Since then, houses--often named after fashion designers--have become 
organizations with chapters in major cities across the country.

About five years ago, Craig Cannon, executive director of K.C. 
Productions, said young men in houses asked him to start hosting balls.

"We let the youth dictate what they wanted," he said.

In 2004, Chicago police were called when a ball held at a YMCA ended 
early in the morning, the same time that a swim meet for children 
began. Parents complained of leather-clad gay men and used condoms in 
the locker room. Ball kids said it marked the first time their world 
collided with mainstream culture.

Still, police and city officials said they have virtually no reports 
of problems with the balls.

As in much of the gay community, there is drug use--mostly Ecstasy, 
patrons say, as well as alcohol and marijuana. Participants talk, 
too, of episodes in which ball kids have stolen credit cards to buy 
designer frocks. But other ball kids turn to thrift stores and 
altering the clothing they already have.

On another Saturday night, the boys prepared for a ball in Sunshine's 
pink bedroom.

Jordan ironed a black shirt near a life-size cutout of Paris Hilton. 
He said the cross tattoo on his arm reminds him that God loves him gay.

"We're just waiting for the white girl to get here," said Sunshine, 
referring to fellow house member Danny, 23, a visual manager at a retail store.

Danny yelled up from the street to Sunshine's window and walked in 
wearing Chanel earrings, a Louis Vuitton satchel, perfectly arched eyebrows.

"Give me your shirt, Momma," Sunshine told him, quickly taking it 
down a size on his sewing machine.

"I'm winning tonight," said Danny, who asked that his last name not be used.

He practiced walking down a runway. Sunshine handed Danny sunglasses 
and pinned a Barbie brooch to his jeans. Danny applied a final coat 
of lip gloss.

Blocks away on West Jackson, a ball had begun.

Like a school dance, paper star decorations hung from the ballroom's 
ceiling and bottled water was sold instead of alcohol. Hundreds of 
ball kids, who paid roughly $20 apiece to get in, hugged, kissed, held hands.

"The ball scene has offered, for a lot of young men who have been 
isolated from their families and their schools, an outlet to meet 
other young men like themselves," said Charles Nelson, director of 
the Young Men for Community Advocacy Project at South Side Help Center.

"It's a place where they can go and feel a sense of freedom to be the 
way they want to be."

But, like a school dance, the ball scene has a hierarchy.

At the ball, members of major Chicago houses sat at reserved tables 
that cost more. An argument erupted when a non-member refused to move.

The House of Ninja--that night consisting of Danny, Jordan and 
Sunshine--sat in plastic chairs along the dance floor. They were the 
new kids on the block trying to keep an old house alive.

The emcee kicked off the ball by introducing legendary ball kids and 
"new girls and popular girls," Sunshine said. They strutted like rock 
stars into a purple spotlight.

Jordan walked in, lifting his shirt, taking off his sunglasses. Danny 
spun. Like a proud father, Sunshine looked on.

The DJ mixed a club beat, and the emcee chanted: "Rewind that track 
so I can arch my back!" Acrobatic dancers spun, kicked, made circles 
with their arms, twisting themselves into impossible shapes. House 
members stood and cheered.

A stream of extravagant fashion flooded the dance floor: designer 
frocks of pink quilt, top hats, glitter, cowboy hats, men dressed as women.

By 5 a.m. a voguing battle was in full force between the House of 
Blahnik and Balenciaga, spectators standing, cheering and yelling, 
fanning themselves with the star decorations that once hung from the ceiling.

Outside, dawn had come.

The end was near, too, for the House of Ninja, which broke up a few 
months later, when members left in search of bigger, more popular 
houses. Jordan joined the House of Escada but missed his Ninja friends.

"I was more happy then," he said.

The ball scene, however, had helped Jordan begin to reconcile with 
his mother, Debra Bryant, 43, a carrier for the U.S. Postal Service.

After Bryant first attended a ball, she said, she began to better 
understand her son. And she and Jordan have begun to mend their 
relationship. Though she had known her son was gay, she did not know 
what it meant for him, and the support he found with the ball kids.

"They were connected in a way," Bryant said. "They embraced each 
other. And that's the way it should be. It was like a family."

Since then, Jordan has moved to a new house--his mother's.
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