“It’s an understatement to say that Paris Is Burning was everything to me. Seeing it finally put a name on what I had somehow known existed perhaps through family conversations, run-ins in the city, and pop cultural dots connected over a couple decades of life—BALLROOM. I was finally able to say, ‘There it is!’ My takeaways from that cult classic are numerous: The dulcet tones of Pepper LaBeija, draped in silk in a lamplit corner, chain-smoking and unravelling the yarn of how she became the next mother of the very first house in Ballroom, the House of LaBeija.” — Ricky Tucker, And the Category Is… : Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community, 2021

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