“In real life,” says Dorian Corey, star of Jennie Livingston’s touchstone 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning, “you can’t get a job as an executive unless you have the educational background and the opportunity.” That is just “the social standing of life.”
Hence drag—and hence the fundamental importance of this subculture to the people it serves. Drag is predicated on twisting the truths of life into slippery, thought-provoking, intimate fantasies: “In a ballroom,” says Corey, “you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive, but you’re looking like an executive. And therefore you’re showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity, I could be one. Because I can look like one.”
Paris Is Burning, which was re-released in select New York theaters this month, has persisted all these years in part due to the charisma of lines like these—sharp, complex, a life’s worth of wisdom packed into a few punchy sentences—and in part due to the substance of the wisdom itself. The queens in the movie keep delivering this message, each in their own way: “I would like to be a spoiled, rich white girl,” says Venus Xtravaganza. “They get what they want, whenever they want it.” So Venus’s style of drag is poised, moneyed, effortlessly feminine, aspirational, the epitome of what the queens call realness: drag so seamless it blends with the realities that it mimics, to the point of a bystander being unable to tell the difference.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/06/paris-is-burning-documentary-drag-jennie-livingston-interview