Notes On… The Latex Ball
It was my second time attending the Latex Ball as a GMHC staff member, but I’ve come to learn that you don’t really attend the Latex Ball- you step into it. You’re crowned in community, and reminded that public health is not just about systems. It’s about people. It’s about presence. It’s about culture that refuses to die.
The Latex Ball began in 1993, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, when far too many Black and Latinx queer and trans people were being buried before they were ever fully seen. GMHC, already a lifeline for many, created the Latex Ball as a radical act of meeting the moment, not in boardrooms, but in ballrooms, not in shame-based messaging, but in sequined survival.
The name itself, Latex, is a metaphor. A symbol of protection, of pleasure, of defiance. Of making safety seductive. Here, harm reduction is not abstract theory; it’s embodied.
As a therapist, I often sit with clients in the aftermath of disconnection, after rejection, after trauma, after being told in countless ways that they do not belong. But the Latex Ball tells a different story. It says: You belong here; brilliantly, loudly, defiantly. The Ball functions as what D.W. Winnicott might have called a transitional space, a container where the authentic self can emerge without fear of annihilation.
The categories are legendary. Face, Runway, Sex Siren, Realness, Vogue Performance, but beneath each one is a psychological truth. Face is about being seen. Realness is about safety. Runway is about claiming space. Sex Siren is about being desired on your own terms. Vogue is about storytelling through the body. Narrating what words cannot hold.
There is therapeutic power in that.
Because what is therapy, if not helping someone feel whole again?
And what is ballroom, if not a sacred space where people remind one another that they already are?
At GMHC, we offer HIV testing, safer sex kits, PrEP and PEP navigation, linkage to multiple avenues of care. But what makes the Latex Ball different is that these resources are delivered in joy. Wrapped in cultural intelligence and mutual respect. The kind of outreach that doesn’t talk at people, but walks with them.
And I’ll be honest; there is something healing for me too, as a queer clinician of faith, to be in that room. To feel the gospel of bass and belonging. To remember that our work, whether in the clinic or the ballroom, is not just to reduce harm, but to restore dignity.
Not just to name trauma, but to make space for joy.
So yes, it was my second time at the Latex Ball.
And once again, I left changed.
