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SEE IT: New York City Council Turns Chamber Into Drag Runway For ‘Pride Ball’

Performers in drag sauntered and sashayed around the chambers to applause, cheers, and loud catcalls.

Virginia Kruta
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SEE IT: New York City Council Turns Chamber Into Drag Runway For ‘Pride Ball’
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

New York City converted the city council chambers to a drag runway and stage to kick off Pride Month.

Good Shepherd Services, an organization that claims to be “guided by social and racial justice,” shared video of staff members voguing — a kind of dance that originated in LGBTQ circles — during the council’s first “Pride Ball.’

The LGBTQIA+ Caucus hosted the event, dubbed the city’s first Pride Ball, with Councilmembers Chi Ossé of Brooklyn and Justin Sanchez of the Bronx presiding over the raucous celebrations. 

Performers in drag sauntered and sashayed around the chambers to applause, cheers, and loud catcalls.

The City Council also released several official photos from the event.

The members of New York City’s Council appear to be picking up where Democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani left off when he claimed that one month was not long enough to celebrate all of the queer and trans-identifying people of New York.

“It would take far more than a month to honor the contributions of queer and transgender New Yorkers. From the Cercle Hermaphroditos in 1895, the first trans advocacy group in the United States, to the drag balls of the Harlem Renaissance, to the Stonewall uprising, to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, to ACT UP!, founded in 1987 as queer people fought for their lives while the Reagan administration looked away, New York City’s history has long been shaped by queer and trans New Yorkers,” Mamdani said in an X post on June 1. “To all our queer and trans neighbors: you deserve a City where you can afford to live safely, openly, and joyfully.”

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