noun General Slang

the children

· noun · ballroom

The junior members of a ballroom house, raised and mentored by its mother and father.

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Definitions

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In ballroom, a house isn't a building, it's a family. The mother and father at the top, and beneath them, the children: the younger members they take in, train, dress, school in the categories, and send out to walk. The children are siblings to each other, brothers and sisters in the same house, and the lineage runs deeper than that, into aunts and grandparents. For Black and Latino LGBTQ kids cast out by their birth families, this was the family that actually showed up. Not a metaphor. A real chosen family with real roles.

“Mother brought three of the children to the ball to walk their first category.”
by community
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the children In A Sentence

Mother brought three of the children to the ball to walk their first category.

Origin & Usage

Harlem ball culture of the 1970s-80s, where house mothers and fathers built chosen-family structures for LGBTQ youth, especially Black and Latino, often rejected by biological kin. Documented in Paris Is Burning (1990).

Variants childrenhouse childrenkids
Tags #ballroom#house#lgbtq#chosen-family

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