Outside of New York City, the names Willi Ninja and Ana “Rockafella” Garcia aren’t immediately associated together. The former, famed for his momentous career as a pioneer of vogue culture in New York City, while the later, rose to prominence as a B-girl in a male-dominated breaking scene: two legends in the dance world, whose creative work is often discussed as if they occurred in different periods of history, rather than cohesively. However, in 2016, at the 10th anniversary even to of Ninja’s passing at the Bronx Museum of Arts, Garcia was present in a powerfully poignant way—as the event’s hostess. “Throughout the evening, what we would like to do is be able to share some of the testimonials from the people, the legendary people, who not only shared dance, but life memories with Willi Ninja,” Garcia passionately emphasized to the crowd. The dancer spoke about Ninja’s greatness, immersing herself in a night of Black queerness and vogue excellence. An iconic B-girl hosting an event dedicated to an iconic vogue dancer serves as a reminder of the symbiotic ties that vogue and hip-hop culture share, the deeply interwoven artistic contributions of Black queer people in the hip-hop world, and the unspoken rhythmic dialogue constantly exchanged between the two.

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There is much ado about the sudden appearance of openly queer rappers in millennial hip-hop. From Deep Dickollective, (creatively conceived on the West Coast in the 90s) to Mykki Blanco and Quay Dash, the age of the internet provides a newfound visibility to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming unknown in previous years. Despite newfound exposure to a sparkling plethora of rappers, dancers, graffiti artists, and DJs who aren’t cishet men, queerness in hip-hop isn’t a twenty-first century phenomena—Black queer people, particularly those living in the times of hip-hop’s inception in the political and economic social decay of New York City, indelibly left their mark on the culture decades ago. To understand, revere and adore vogue means recognizing its vital position in the formation of hip-hop culture.

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Vogue and hip-hop, two vibrant subcultures birthed in the heart of New York City, are often spoken about as two separate creative movements, despite being creatively established by communities fraught with political marginalization, economic disparity, and a lack of social resources. Disenchanted with predominately white drag pageants, the Black queer community in Harlem began establishing their own dances in the 1960s, dubbing the new, creative dances as “vogue”. Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, and Paris Dupree were three of the most recognized innovators of the new art form, providing a space for young queers of color with dance as creative resistance. Ten years later in the Bronx, Black and Afro-Latinx youth enduring rapid urban decay, witnessing school programs cut during financial crisis, and apartment buildings crumble from fires, also developed their own creative response to living in a chaotic world. In 1973, Jamaican migrants Clive and Cindy Campbell, using an impressive sound system, held their very first back-to-school-jam at 1520 Sedgewick, jumpstarting a DIY culture that transformed the New York in its totality.

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Both subcultures, whether consciously or not, stylistically borrow from each other. With regards to physical form, breaking, considered the visual component of hip-hop, has the most noticeable ties to vogue’s Black queer influence. Vogue places emphasis on detail, originality, theatrical elements, and showing up an opponent, similar to the creative dialogue of breaking. While breaking is also influenced by African martial arts, its stylistic references also echo vogue dancing—at a ballroom event, it isn’t uncommon for a vogue dancer to do a 360-spin on their back, high-jumps, leg-spins, or make hand-gestures that are similarly performed in breaking cyphers. Battling, a feature in vogue (most especially in old way) and hip-hop dance, is so skillfully and artistically crafted, the two emphasizing dance as dueling vocabulary. Ballroom culture encompasses vibrant chanting during different categories, (face, runway, baby vogue, butch femme, hand performance battles, etc.) but most vocally during vogue performances. Toasting, an African tradition, transplanted to the Bronx by way of Caribbean-born DJ Kool Herc over reggae rhythm vinyl records before the advent of rapping; chanting during vogue dance is the direct counterpart to rapping over a beat, meaning both art forms indulge in Afro-diasporic tradition. The flamboyant characterization of vogue chanting, playfully subverting rhyme scheme, flow, and delivery shared close ties with the development of rap music as a dominant voice of disenchanted BIPOC youth.

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The dress code of hip-hop’s early days also shared a deep symbiosis with vogue culture; men at the park jams in the Bronx weren’t afraid to sport crop-tops, glitterati fabric, or tight-fitting pants, defying the confinement of hyper masculinity that only later came to dominate the changing face of hip-hop. Vogue’s celebration of femininity and flamboyance coincided with the embrace of whimsical, androgynous fashion, free of judgement of feminine people, established houses named after fashion legends. Hip-hop and vogue pioneers utilized outlandish fashion as a staple of underground culture. As hip-hop diverged to mainstream attention in the early 90s, its style transformed into one of free artistic self-expression to that of static masculinity as it was commodified, while voguing remained an underground phenomenon that allowed its participants a refuge from toxic masculinity.  

Black queer culture is often discussed in regards to setting trends, but not with regards the formation of hip-hop; the character of hip-hop is crafted by mainstream media as a creation of cisheterosexual masculinity, rather than a culture that included the Black community’s most marginalized people—those who are immigrants, disabled, women, and queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming. The music industry’s imbedded heterosexism ignores the ties that connect a Black queer presence with one of the most influential art form in the world.

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As Black queer people are the artistic, cultural, and political foundation for the entirety of Black culture, they must be credited in having influence in hip-hop culture, specifically in the context of voguing culture and dance. In understanding the queer impact in hip-hop from the very beginning, only then can the visibility of queer rappers be acknowledged not as a new phenomenon, but a continuation of our rightful place in the culture.

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