Loveli Mohair and the Radical Legacy of Black Drag
Let’s talk about realness.
The first person I came out to in my family was my Uncle Ronnie.
He came up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, a Black boy whose teachers wrote worried notes on his report cards with concern about his preference for playing with the girls at recess. In the life he lived before I knew him, he was a globetrotting photographer who played the drums in rock bands in his spare time.
He was living in Seoul, South Korea, when he tested positive for HIV and went back to the states. This was in the early 1990s, when thousands of gay men like him were dying horrible, often lonely deaths, sometimes cut off from their families, definitely rejected for care by their government. My first memories of Uncle Ronnie were of the vague panic around 1990 that ensued when my kindergarten class was supposed to go on a field trip to the annual AIDS Walk; my family, worried about the stigma, anxious about the future, didn’t let me go. But even then, I knew Uncle Ronnie was sick. And I knew it didn’t stop him.It didn’t stop him from cracking jokes at Thanksgiving. It didn’t stop him from always being the cattiest motherfucker in the room.
I knew I was queer from a young age, and I felt safe with Uncle Ronnie. He’d traveled the world, stood before death’s door, and still smiled. Of course he was the first person I told about my first girlfriend.
Oh! He raised his eyebrows and turned to me with a mischievous grin. I wanted to know his advice. Where should I go? We were from arguably the gayest city in the world, but it didn’t feel that way. When I tried to go to the LGBT youth center in the Castro, the guy at the front desk made a big deal about them not really playing a lot of hip-hop so it might not really suit me. By then, I shuffled a steady rotation of Eiffel 65 and Linkin Park. I left.
That encounter was on my mind years later as I sat across from Uncle Ronnie. By then, I was a college student majoring in Black Studies. I had recently watched Tongues Untied, the 1989 experimental documentary by Marlon Riggs that explored the erasure of Blackness in mainstream queer culture in the 1980s. Riggs describes his time in the Castro this way: “I was immersed in Vanilla.”
Realness.
For queer and trans folks of color, realness has multiple definitions. It’s the ability to pass, to perform gender so magnificently that onlookers can’t tell it’s even a performance. It also alludes to a person’s authenticity, their willingness to be their truest selves.
Here’s another definition from Oxford’s Dictionary: “the state or being of actually existing.”
I immediately thought about Uncle Ronnie. Now, I was sitting across from him, coming out, articulating my own place in a strong and resilient Black queer lineage.
Did you ever hang out in the Castro? I asked Uncle Ronnie.
He shook his head vigorously.
No, he said. We stayed in the TL.
The Tenderloin has long been a haven for San Francisco’s queer and trans communities of color. Years before the Stonewall Uprisings unofficially launched the Gay Liberation Movement, trans women fought the police at Compton Cafeteria in the Tenderloin.
Realness.
For queer and trans folks of color, realness has multiple definitions. It’s the ability to pass, to perform gender so magnificently that onlookers can’t tell it’s even a performance. It also alludes to a person’s authenticity, their willingness to be their truest selves.
Here’s another definition from Oxford’s Dictionary: “the state or being of actually existing.”
Simple enough.
But imagine, for a second, that you’re a 17-year-old from the east side of Vallejo. You’ve just driven to Los Angeles to attend your first ball.
You’re no novice, you’ve been to gay clubs, but this? It’s different. You’re looking at a group of men who are the manliest men you’ve ever seen. Cute, right? But then the DJ switches it up, and these manly men with their flat chests and chiseled jawlines start moving in ways that would put even the most accomplished Swan Lake performers to shame. Their arms slice the air; their feet barely touch the ground. Then, you hear their voices or see their bound chests. In that moment, something clicks: gender isn’t a given. It’s a hustle.
Ballroom wasn’t just about competition. It was about survival. Loveli came of age at a time when Black queer and trans people in the Bay Area were navigating the twin epidemics of AIDS and crack. As Marvin K. White, a contemporary of Loveli’s and a longtime drag scene fixture, put it: “There was an immediacy to it. We didn’t know who was dying or who had full-blown AIDS. The club was our commons. It was our town square.”
This was Loveli Mohair’s introduction to ballroom culture—a culture she would come to define in the Bay Area. It was 1997, and Loveli had just graduated high school when she met Dion Mizrahi, a mentor and house mother who would change her life. They met at Cables Reef, a Black gay bar in Oakland, and soon Loveli was traveling the country, introduced as Dion’s drag daughter. Her first time walking a ball, she competed in the category of Realness. When the MC asked what made her realer than the other girls, Loveli looked around, took the mic, and simply said, “First of all…”
The crowd erupted. Loveli won.
That moment sparked a legacy. By the late 1990s, Loveli wasn’t just walking balls—she was ruling them. She quickly became known not only for her looks, style, and sharp tongue, but for her nurturing presence. “My presence was powerful,” she said. “I could just stand in the corner with my arms crossed, and people would ask who I was.”
Ballroom wasn’t just about competition. It was about survival. Loveli came of age at a time when Black queer and trans people in the Bay Area were navigating the twin epidemics of AIDS and crack. As Marvin K. White, a contemporary of Loveli’s and a longtime drag scene fixture, put it: “There was an immediacy to it. We didn’t know who was dying or who had full-blown AIDS. The club was our commons. It was our town square.”
In Oakland, drag was homegrown. It was performed by people who went to Oakland public schools, who rolled off bar stools to take the stage. The performances weren’t polished. They were holy, urgent, and often memorial. They were how the community coped, celebrated, and mourned its own. “Drag was definitely more transactional in San Francisco and more transformational in Oakland,” White explained.
The ballroom scene has roots stretching back to the Harlem Renaissance, when Black performers created drag spaces as a form of artistic expression and resistance. In the early 20th century, Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball became a touchstone of queer nightlife, drawing thousands of attendees in full costume. Despite laws criminalizing cross-dressing, these events were extravagant declarations of gender realization. During the postwar period, drag balls became sanctuaries for Black and brown LGBTQ people, who were often excluded from white-dominated queer spaces.
By the 1960s and 70s, the rise of houses—like House of LaBeija and House of Corey—formalized the kinship structure of ballroom. Mothers and fathers guided their children through not only performance categories but life outside the ball. In cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, balls offered respite from the daily hostility of police, family rejection, and systemic racism. In 1990, Jennie Livingston’s documentary, Paris Is Burning, introduced elements of ballroom to a broader audience, but it also revealed the exploitation and erasure that often accompany mainstream visibility.
The Bay Area’s ballroom scene emerged in parallel, shaped by the region’s racial dynamics and displacement. While San Francisco was often held up as a national beacon for LGBTQ rights, its political and cultural visibility rarely included the experiences of Black and brown queer people. Oakland, by contrast, provided a space where local Black trans and queer communities could build their own stages, free from the pressures of polished performance or white spectatorship. Drag there was improvisational, spiritual, and often political.
Much of this divergence can be traced back to the Bay Area’s enduring legacy of residential segregation. Redlining maps from the 1930s codified racial hierarchies into city planning, denying Black and brown families access to loans and trapping them in disinvested neighborhoods. In Oakland, this meant Black communities were concentrated in the flatlands while white communities sprawled into the hills. As jobs disappeared and policing intensified in the post-industrial era, these neighborhoods became both battlegrounds and sanctuaries—spaces of hyper-surveillance but also of resistance, creativity, and kinship.
LGBTQ people of color were doubly marginalized: by the broader public and, often, by the largely white queer establishment across the Bay in San Francisco. Black drag queens and trans women found community not in rainbow-flag-lined neighborhoods but in church basements, living rooms, and small bars like Cables Reef. These were places where chosen families formed and survival skills were passed down—and where ballroom took root, not as spectacle, but as sustenance.
When the AIDS crisis hit, it devastated these communities. Beyond the medical impact, the devastation was structural. Black and brown queer people, already excluded from mainstream healthcare and social safety nets, bore the brunt of the epidemic. Activist infrastructure like ACT UP and Gay Men’s Health Crisis were often dominated by white leadership and focused on white, middle-class gay men. In the East Bay, drag performances turned into impromptu memorials. Gospel songs rang out over tiny stages. As White remembers, queens became ministers of grief. “They were enlisted to perform at celebrations of life,” he said. “Their drag was not just performance. It was liturgical.”
The spiritual undertones of Oakland’s drag scene are no accident. Many performers came from deeply religious households. Some returned to church as adults. Loveli herself was raised in a family of nine, where church was a constant and judgment just as present. “I vowed that I would never be like that,” she said of her mother’s addiction. And she didn’t just abstain from drugs and alcohol—she built something new. A space where trans and queer people could thrive without having to trade safety for recognition.
What she’s built is more than a legacy. It’s a blueprint for how Black queer life can thrive in the face of displacement, disrespect, and disinvestment. “Ballroom was our way of expressing ourselves,” she said. “Now it’s mainstream. But back then? It was for us.”
In the Bay, Loveli stood at the heart of that movement. She threw her first ball in downtown Oakland at 14th and Grand—“It was a smash!”—and eventually took on the name Revlon. She became the West Coast Mother of the House of Revlon, guiding scores of ballroom kids in everything from wardrobe to life decisions. “If you don’t have a job,” she’d tell them, “you don’t need to be at the ball. You need to be sitting at a computer looking for work.”
Loveli’s resistance to drugs, alcohol, and sex work set her apart. Her mother struggled with addiction, and Loveli made a vow early on: she would never be like that. She lived by example, and her discipline became a form of love. “Anything I tell you, take it into consideration,” she said. “Because I made it through.”
As ballroom moved into the mainstream, Loveli grew disillusioned. Reality TV shows and celebrity co-signs brought visibility—but also erasure. “They sold us out,” she said. “Now everybody wants to be part of ballroom. But when this was being created, where were they?” She watched white performers gain access to grants and platforms, while Black and brown trailblazers were pushed aside.
Yet, she remains undeterred. Even today, Loveli is designing costumes, mentoring performers, and holding court at balls—only when she feels like it. “Being an icon, when we show up, it’s serious,” she said. “But I only show up when necessary.”
What she’s built is more than a legacy. It’s a blueprint for how Black queer life can thrive in the face of displacement, disrespect, and disinvestment. “Ballroom was our way of expressing ourselves,” she said. “Now it’s mainstream. But back then? It was for us.”
Today, ballroom culture is both more visible and more contested than ever. Mainstream media has embraced the language, style, and structure of ballroom, sometimes with reverence, other times with appropriation. Shows like FX’s Pose and HBO Max’s Legendary have brought ballroom into living rooms across the country, introducing audiences to the terminology—like “category is,” “ten across the board,” and of course, “realness”—while also dramatizing the grit and glamour of the scene.
For some, this visibility represents long-overdue recognition. Pose, in particular, made history for its cast of Black and brown trans women, and for centering the HIV/AIDS crisis as a key narrative arc. But for community veterans like Loveli, the glow-up has been bittersweet. Ballroom has always been more than what’s depicted on screen. It’s not just a look or a lip-sync; it’s family, survival, and deeply embedded cultural resistance.
In real life, ballroom continues to evolve. Across the country, new generations of houses are sprouting up, often expanding beyond traditional urban hubs. Digital platforms like Instagram and TikTok have allowed performers to share routines, elevate fashion, and challenge gender conventions on a global scale. Online balls became especially popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, when physical gatherings were unsafe. The virtual space allowed for innovation, but it also surfaced new challenges around authenticity and access.
If the last few decades have taught her anything, it’s that ballroom will endure. It has weathered neglect, co-optation, and crisis. It has lived through epidemics and mass incarceration, through crackdowns and shutdowns. It adapts, because it has to. “As long as there are girls who need a place to shine,” Loveli said, “there will be ballroom.”
In the Bay Area, the scene remains tight-knit but deeply fractured. Gentrification and rising costs of living have pushed many Black and brown queer residents out of Oakland. Loveli herself has noted how difficult it is to maintain spaces for performance, let alone sustain a community that once relied on proximity and informality. “It’s different now,” she said. “It used to be (that) we all knew each other. Now, half the people at these events don’t know the history—they just want the fame.”
Still, balls continue. And Loveli, for all her skepticism, hasn’t turned away. Her latest mission is to create housing for trans and queer youth, many of whom are pushed out of their homes and fall through the cracks of government services. Ballroom is still the organizing force behind her life—but now, it’s about sustaining the culture off the floor, too.
If the last few decades have taught her anything, it’s that ballroom will endure. It has weathered neglect, co-optation, and crisis. It has lived through epidemics and mass incarceration, through crackdowns and shutdowns. It adapts, because it has to. “As long as there are girls who need a place to shine,” Loveli said, “there will be ballroom.”
And Loveli? She still stands in the back, arms folded, watching everything. Ready to step in. Ready to serve.
