The work of the historian isn’t usually the most thrilling pursuit. After all, poring over archives and penning fellowships isn’t exactly material for a world tour. But sometimes, you can make a finding that feels like being gifted the final piece of an immense puzzle. This was precisely my experience last year when I examined the collections of famed ballroom photographer Chantal Regnault and New York journalist and nightlife staple Chi Chi Valenti.
At the time, I was already a few years into researching a book about ballroom history, the now world-famous culture born and bred by working class Black and Latino LGBTQ+ people, who walked balls in Harlem church halls and vogued on the Christopher Street Pier. I visited Chantal and Chi Chi because they were in possession of among our community’s most coveted archival material: issues of Marcel Christian Princess LaBeija’s “Idle Sheets,” the Rosetta Stone of ballroom. Utilizing poetry, gossip, illustration, and more, these multimedia documents offer a fastidiously detailed insider account of ballroom culture during the late ’80s and early ’90s. They are precious and singular, not to mention the life’s work of ballroom’s first major historian and my North Star, Marcel Christian.
When I sat down with the Idle Sheets that snowy January day in New York, it felt like going in a time machine to an era of ballroom that was radically different from the one that exists today. In Marcel’s world, ballroom was more lyrical, more theatrical, and more community-oriented. It was also worthy of documentation — an important note considering Marcel’s work, which treated ballroom as its own form of Black gay culture with a bespoke history, predating outsider portraits by many years.
As I studied the papers, I learned the historian began writing them in 1986, at the height of New York’s Downtown Scene and right before voguing was about to hit the mainstream. He would sell or give out these packets at balls as a kind of community newsletter, so folks could kill “idle time” before or after the function. The packets included meticulous documentation of the scene’s current, extinct, and near-extinct houses, their active and non-active members, lively commentary on new and existing categories and individual status in the scene, and even community gossip in the form of the occasional “Scandal Sheet.” For instance, in Idle Sheet III, he sub-reads certain ball promoters who didn’t give out all the cash prizes without naming names, noting that, “The good thing in 1986, most cash prizes were paid for most cash promise categories. Like I said, ‘Most.’”
Marcel’s Idle Sheets reflected the ingenuity of the scene he captured, at times invoking wholly novel forms to illustrate the beauty of the balls. One device Marcel employed was what can be understood as “choreo poetry,” or a whimsical form of musing combining poetry, dance, music, and song. As he wrote in a poem entitled “The Merry-Go-Round of the Marathon Circuit,” from Idle Sheet IV: “Get your money and the awards / So you can pretend you are bored / With this and that and all and such / Oh Please, Miss Thing, you are too much / Too much for coffee / Too much for tea / If you walkin’ Grand / You’re too much from me.”
Holding up the stories of ballroom forebears like Marcel Christian is especially significant as our culture once again enters the mainstream. Last year, Beyonce’s “Renaissance Tour” earned $579 million and highlighted ballroom on a global stage. Songs like “Pure/Honey” that directly sample ballroom classics rang out in Stockholm, Detroit and Vancouver as ballroom veterans like Honey Balenciaga, Carlos Basquiat and Darius Hickman vogued and pirouetted around Queen Bey on stage. Taylor Swift’s backup dancer and ballroom alum Kameron Saunders brought voguing to the “Eras Tour.” Meanwhile, Mother Madonna honored the community again during “Vogue” with mini-balls on her “Celebration Tour.” I believe that today’s global appreciation of ballroom would not be possible without the foundation built by ballroom stalwarts like Marcel.
Hailing from Buffalo, New York, Marcel, né Herman Marcellus Williams, made his way down to New York City by the ’70s and quickly joined the world of theater and the arts as a designer and costumer. He was the in-house costumer for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and in his lifetime earned a number of awards for his costume work, including two Audelco Awards, an award established in 1973 by Vivian Robinson to honor excellence in African American theater in New York City.
Marcel discovered the drag ball scene in the 1960s, when balls were mainly social gatherings for femqueens and their admirers with some categories, cash prizes, and trophies. He watched the ball world transform in the late 1960s and early ’70s into more structured events. This new version of ballroom created the house system and ushered in an era that included butchqueens (i.e. gay and bisexual cis men), butches (i.e. butch lesbians), and women (i.e. cis, straight, and feminine lesbian, bisexual and queer women). Marcel was quite welcoming of these changes, especially through his support of the House of Del Rios, the first ballroom house to be founded by a cis woman mother.
Marcel was a staple of the community not only as the creator of the Idle Sheets, but also as an active participant in the ball scene, which he referred to as the “Marathon Circuit” as the balls became longer with the introduction of new categories. As for the historian himself, he had a presence in the “Futuristic” category; his other staples were “Nostalgia” and “Mardi Gras.” However, he was an icon for “Ethnic,” an older category in ballroom where runway competitors had to bring it with an “effect” – a detailed aesthetic, costume, and/or props – that displayed a culture outside of the U.S. For Marcel, this was a favorite, as he loved to honor Black history and would model himself after archetypes like African kings or Egyptian pharaohs using intricate outfits he designed and created himself. Throughout his ballroom career he received 150 trophies and awards and was inducted into the Ballroom Hall of Fame.
As a ballroom historian working in his shadow, Marcel means the world to me. His work provided me with the foundation to mine as an author, a producer, and a screenwriter. It was rare for someone in the ballroom scene to stop to savor the moment and see the larger picture of what the culture was and where it would go in the 1980s. During his lifetime, Marcel wanted to use the “Idle Sheets” as a way to write a book on ballroom history; unfortunately, it’s a dream he never realized before his death in 2004. Nonetheless, Marcel’s passing marked a genesis point for the community to see its own beauty, worth, and value, as being part of a larger slice of American and African-American history. As I continue my work on a comprehensive book on ballroom culture and history, I view my project as the continuation of Marcel’s legacy. Shining a light on Marcel’s pioneering work in the Idle Sheets is a way to honor him as a ballroom elder whose legacy lives on in the stories and histories that we share about the community today.
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