"Voguing" among gay men in New York goes beyond cross-dressing, beyond play acting, to becoming: it is a highly developed form of anomie. In voguing, individuals live their dreams on the fashion runway. But it is not all high fashion: one becomes a schoolgirl accompanying her younger sibling to school, another, a Merrill-Lynch executive, yet another, a soldier. Beyond the performance extravaganzas, which are themselves a commentary, a subculture around voguing emulates the family structure: each "house" has a mother, and children, and commitment. Amid an often violent underground milieu it is an attempt to make a new American family by those who have been cruelly cast out of its warmth, but make it on one's own terms, those of lived melodrama. "I am one of the upcoming legendary children": even Beaver Cleaver couldn't make this claim. This compassionate and analytical film examines and uses voguing's highly codified language system with its linguistically astounding concept of "realness." (JB)