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The central argument in Bailey’s book surrounds the performance of racialized gender, sex, and sexuality. Ballroom culture, we learn, has six gender categories, and circulating around each category is a set of discourses and practices concerning issues of sexuality and social power. As the title of the book suggests, Bailey deeply interrogates one of the categories in the ballroom gender system, the butch queen. It is in this early discussion of the gender system where Bailey introduces the key concepts that undergird much of the ethnographic engagement in the rest of the text, including performance and the concept of “realness.” Bailey argues that the individual and communal performances of sex, gender, and sexuality are a form of “work” that ballroom members do in an “attempt to refract the violence to which Black and sexual minorities are subjected to in Detroit” (32). Interestingly enough, the form that this refraction takes is in the collective and individual attempt to achieve “realness.” Realness refers to one’s successful “minimiz[ation] or elimina[tion] of any sign of deviation from gender and sexuality norms in dominant heteronormative society” in the performances of sex, gender, and sexuality (58). Realness animates many of the performances in the event through which ballroom is best known to outsiders — the ball. Balls are the spaces where performances are read—where one’s realness is determined, judged, and proven in a competition that pits house against house. So when one performs in the Femme Queen category, for example, dancers must work to achieve the best embodiment of femininity, one that most closely matches the ways that femininity has been defined by heteronormative society. Dancers must demonstrate their ability to blend in within normative spaces. According to Bailey, realness is not simply a way of miming heteronormative society, but a “creative response” to the dangers associated with not blending in, and realness functions as both an “analytic and a guide for understanding the strategic gender performances that members deploy in the urban spaces in which they live and move daily” (65). If these Black non-gender-conforming sexual minorities must move through life performing normative gender and sexualities in order to garner for themselves what should be the right of everyone — a basic level of freedom from violence and discrimination — then balls offer the space for being recognized and rewarded for those performances, something that is not guaranteed in normative society. Ball events offer an opportunity to exercise “greater agency in shaping how they are viewed by altering and performing their bodies in ways that disguise their gender and sexual nonconformity” (65). However, since ballroom community members rely on normative ideas of femininity and masculinity, they demarcate the boundaries of normative categories and thus reinscribe the very boundaries that mark their bodies as “out of place” and inauthentic in normative society. Yet, it is in these distinctive Black queer spaces that one can demonstrate their ability to question, revise, and expertly perform various categories of racialized gender, sex, and sexuality— and, thus, demonstrate their realness (32, 58). Realness is how participants can prove that they do indeed have what it takes to “fit” into the “real world,” even as the real world castigates and ostracizes Black sexual and gender dissidents.