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. 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. 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.
