Launching Legends of Vogue

My name is Sydney Baloue (he/him/his/gurl). I am a Black and South Asian transgender man who has worn many hats in my life: researcher, public policy analyst, urban planner, journalist, TV writer/producer, filmmaker, PhD candidate, author, and artist.

My main focus of the past 9 years has been as a historian, archivist, and storyteller of the ballroom scene, a community of LGBTQ+ people of color who compete for cash prizes, trophies, and status at events called balls. I share and document ballroom culture for a living as an active member, ball walker, voguer, DJ and ball producer. As a journalist, I have written for publications like The New York Times, Vice, and THEM. I also served as Co-Executive Producer of HBO Max’s Legendary, a ballroom competition series that ran for three seasons from 2020 - 2022.

Like many diverse stories being banned from the mainstream, my work as a storyteller of ballroom culture and history is under siege. DEI backlash in Hollywood, in the media at large, and in governments in the US and abroad makes it especially difficult to tell the stories of marginalized communities and oppressed people like me.

In response, I am putting this rich body of knowledge I have accumulated and synthesized into the public in a new weekly Substack project I call, Legends of Vogue.

Legends of Vogue tells the stories or legends of the ballroom scene and it discusses the legends or important people who made the culture possible. This project shares ballroom’s rich history with photos, videos, anecdotes, oral histories, synthesized data, memoir and storytelling by using Madonna’s “Vogue” as a launching point to dive into this world of creativity, hardship, resilience, beauty and triumph.

The series is the amalgamation of ethnographic and analytical research I completed during my Master's in Urban Policy at the London School of Economics in 2016 and a year I spent in a PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania from 2017-18. This project encompasses archival research I completed through the Martin Duberman Award at the New York Public Library in 2022. It includes over 50+ oral histories I have completed with members of the ballroom scene in New York City and abroad. It shares folklore and day-to-day stories from ballroom legends, icons, and pioneers I have amassed in the 13 years since I joined this community. It also shares my story as a transgender man who made history on the ballroom floor as a voguer and in Hollywood as a writer and producer.

I invite you to support me as a writer, producer, documentarian, and artist of this work. As an independent creator, my goal is to use this funding and this project to support the creation of a new book that covers this complex world and history. Your support would be directly supporting me as an artist, historian, and archivist, whose storytelling is under attack. I invite you to become involved in the distribution of my work in this new form as a reader, donor, or cheerleader. I appreciate your support and ask you to share it with others, so they too can know more about this rich and fascinating world!