Entry · catalog no. 0035
house father
/ ˈhaʊs ˌfɑðər /HOWSS FAH-thur
n. · Harlem and New York City ballroom · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
The man who heads a ballroom house: recruiting and raising the house's children, training them for categories, walking them to balls, settling disputes, and in a great many cases housing and feeding young people whose families have put them out. The title is literal about the work. A house may have a mother, a father, or both, and the parent's name is the house's name.
“He was house father to half the kids on that block before anybody knew what a house was.”
Origin & Attribution
Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom culture in Harlem and greater New York City. Houses took their family structure in the early 1970s as gay men entered a ball scene that had run on drag competition since the nineteenth century, and the mother-father-children arrangement was fully established by the time Paris Is Burning documented the New York houses in 1990. Marlon M. Bailey's fieldwork on Detroit ballroom sets out the parental roles as the scene's actual kinship system rather than a metaphor for one.
1970s
Houses take on the mother-father-children structure as gay men enter the ball scene
1990
Paris Is Burning documents the New York houses and their parents
2013
Marlon M. Bailey's Butch Queens Up in Pumps treats house parenthood as ballroom's kinship system
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and New York City ballroom · 1970s
Spoken by
Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom communities — Harlem and New York first, then Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and beyond
$HOUSEFThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising36 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1990
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Paris Is Burning — directed by Jennie Livingston, Off White Productions, 1990
film · documentary
■
+ Cite a sourceButch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit — Marlon M. Bailey, University of Michigan Press, 2013
text · scholarship
See also