In 2020 The Bew York Times named “Got To Be Real” one of the 15 Songs That Shook New York’s Queer Dance Floors in the 1970s and ’80s. Released in 1978, Cheryl Lynn’s feisty, upbeat disco track “Got to Be Real” became an instant ballroom classic. As contests expanded, categories multiplied and competition intensified, with prizes awarded to entrants whose drag was the most believable, the most real. By the early 1970s, Black drag houses started to multiply and soon outstripped their white counterparts in terms of glamour, style and popularity. The Harlem drag ball scene - described by the social activist and writer Langston Hughes as “the strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem’s spectacles in the 1920s” - fragmented along racial lines in the early 1960s when Black queens became tired of having to “whiten up” if they wanted to have a chance of winning any in-house beauty contest.
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