- Christopher Street is like our Mother.
It was the haven.
We were safe at the pier.
Outside of village you could
get gay bashed, murdered, beat up.
HIV/AIDs hit the House and Ball community really hard.
I was living with HIV for a couple of years now,
at that time.
I was like, "Hey you know I'm living with AIDs.
You know, I have HIV".
People were really shocked.
They were like, "why is this kid doing that?
And why would he put all his business out there?".
Because it was really a secret.
- [Javier] This is Luna Ortiz.
In 1986, at just 14 years old,
Luna Ortiz found out he was HIV positive.
He took what could have been devastating, crippling news
and instead embraced his diagnosis.
Luna rose to the top of the New York City
House and Ball scene in the late 80's.
He became an inspiration for a community
suffering from an epidemic.
He worked tirelessly to push past the stigma
within the ballroom scene and helped organize
the Annual Gay Men's Health Crisis Latex Ball,
a competition that also spotlights HIV education.
Through this intersection of creative expression
and activism, Luna Ortiz continues
to inform, empower, and spark conversations
to end the stigma around the virus.
I'm Javier Muñoz,
And this isn't just our history.
This is Legendary.
- When I started going to the Village to hang out,
because that was like where we all went.
It was where all young, black and latin,
and brown folks would go.
You know in our neighborhoods,
the Bronx, Brooklyn or uptown Manhattan,
you couldn't be as flamboyant.
You couldn't carry on and you know, show yourself.
Some of us would be like this on the Subway,
until we got on the,
"Christopher Street next stop",
we're like
(laughs)
ancy to get off so we could see our friends.
It was just fun times.
And this like, again, the 80's, early 90's.
A lot of young LGBT people were being kicked
out of their homes and so the houses were there
as a support system.
Instead of living in the streets sometimes
they would live with their house parents,
either mother or father.
The house, which is your family,
I look at it like a team because although you're a family,
you're still a team because you gotta go out and compete.
They get you prepared almost like the coach.
So the mother and the father are the coach
and they're preparing you for competition.
In our heads, when we're walking,
everybody's cheering but you're thinking,
"Okay, I am right now I am Cindy Crawford,
and I am walking".
I wanted to like wear feathers and beads.
(laughs)
But within that is still the family structure.
We're the children.
We listen to the parents.
"You need to finish school, you need to get a job
if you're not doing anything. You shouldn't be hanging out
at the pier all night."
(laughs)
That's what a good parent does.
And a house really just supports you
and kind of builds you up.
They say the first house was the House of LaBeija.
Crystal LaBeija was the mother.
She started creating the House of LaBeija
because she felt she was treated unfair
because she was of color.
And it was in a world of other white queens
that were in the pageant.
And so she said, I'm gonna do like the house of Chanel
did in you know, in Paris and you know,
start like, you know, that sort of fashion house name.
Me being the new kid on the block,
you know the LaBeija's were trying to get me.
The Pendavis' were trying to get me.
And that turned into you know, a battle of like,
we gotta to get this new kid in the block.
The house that I went to visit and I was accepted
was the house of Pendavis.
I remember when I went into Avis Pendavis' house,
she says she's the mother of Pendavis
and she said, "Oh, go say hello to your sister
in the next room".
We went to the bedroom next door and there laid,
you know a house member,
one of her daughters who was dying of AIDs.
And this is at a time where hospitals were horrible.
They would leave the food outside.
HIV/AIDs hit the House and Ball community really hard.
Everybody was sort of quiet,
not really talking about what's actually happening.
People were afraid to hug each other.
It was horrible.
I was living with HIV for a couple of years now,
at that time.
I was like, "Hey, you know I'm living with AIDs,
you know I have HIV".
People were really shocked.
They were like, "why is this kid doing that
and why would he put all his business out there?".
Because it was really a secret.
Mind you there was people really going through it.
Like you could see HIV destroying their body.
And but they were the first to be like,
"why is he doing that?".
People were so offended at times.
But then there were people like Avis and Hector Xtravaganza
who were like, "I love what you're doing".
And so within Ballroom I started to sort of,
you know talk individually to people.
People were like, "what could we do? We need to handout
some condoms. We need things happening, like come on".
So the houses came to Gay Men's Health Crisis.
GMHC was the only agency at the time that was doing,
sort of, the work and really invested in prevention
and helping people.
And that's why the House of Latex Project would be born.
If it wasn't for the work that GMHC was doing
helping people I think a lot more of us would
have became infected or would have died
because we didn't have no support whatsoever.
They would train them about HIV and AIDs one-on-one,
how do you get it, how you could hug people,
it's transmitted this way, this way, this way,
information that we know now.
But also support.
Are you hungry?
Your house could come here have groups and meetings.
That's what was so beautiful about being a part of a house.
Besides the competition, for me it was personal.
It was what were doing outside of the Ball
that excite me.
We talked to kids that were like seven, eight years old
and then they had these amazing questions like,
are you afraid of, you know, to die?
And I'm like, oh my god this eight year old
is asking me if I'm afraid to die, you know.
And so it was really intense.
But at the end of it they always use to come up
and give me these beautiful hugs.
So little things like that stay in my memory
that makes me feel, you know like I helped do something.
The Latex Ball was our sort of memorial in a way.
It was what we celebrated each other.
And you would look at everybody,
and everybody's like in the audience like in white.
It was so beautiful.
It was like angels on Earth.
It's not just a ball,
it's basically a community event.
It's a health fair.
It's a perfect place to have togetherness and mourning
while the ball is going on.
Because we're celebrating each other.
- Hi everyone,
thank you so much for watching this episode of Legendary.
If you want more,
check out the full Legendary playlist
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See you next time.