In a series of images from 1962, guests at the National Variety Artists Exotic Carnival and Ball, held at the Manhattan Center, are escorted by police after being charged with masquerading and indecent exposure.⁠⠀ Seven years later, in the same New York borough, the Stonewall riots would ignite following a police raid on the LBGTQ+ bar, marking the beginning of the Pride movement.⁠⠀ The city's drag balls have a rich history dating back to the 19th century, staged in defiance of "masquerade laws" - designed to prevent costume being used to disguise criminal activity, the laws were misused in discrimination of gender variance.⁠⠀ With Harlem's Hamilton Lodge hosting the first reported event in 1869, by the 1920s, a thriving ballroom scene had been established in the Manhattan neighbourhood, running in tandem with the Black cultural movement of the Harlem Renaissance. The poet Langston Hughes was a participant, and recalled "the queerly assorted throng on the dance floor, males in flowing ...