For the queer and trans Black and Latinx subjects in Jennie Livingston’s documentary of New York’s Ballroom scene in the late 1980s, the community formed around the competitive world of drag was a matter of survival. Made over the course of seven years, the film ignited controversy upon its release. Yet Livingston’s nuanced and compassionate filmmaking enabled their subjects to speak at length, so that, as Essex Hemphill observed in 1991, “the authentic voice of this community emerges unfettered.”