Leggoh JohVera is Them’s 2024 Now Award honoree in Nightlife. The Now Awards honor 10 LGBTQ+ vanguards at the forefront of culture and change today. Read more here.
Legendary Leggoh JohVera knows exactly what to do with a microphone. A professional voguer, ballroom commentator, and event producer, JohVera (whose last name blends the surnames of LGBTQ+ activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera) has found the ideal balance between unshakeable confidence and playful repartee, whether he’s doling out tens to a contestant on the floor or leading an impassioned chant in perfect sync with the DJ.
Just watch the way he swans around OTA, the weekly mini-ball series he founded in 2019. With everything it takes to program an event, he’d be forgiven for fading into the background once it’s underway. But as I noticed when attending one recent Monday night, that’s not JohVera’s M.O. Though he wasn’t on MC duty — for the first time in OTA history, he gave two femme queens the honor — JohVera’s voice could still be heard pumping through the rumbling speakers as he dispensed useful advice to the young hopefuls competing for the first time, cracked witty jokes in rapidfire succession, and when necessary, reminded everyone that, “A chop is a fucking chop.”
As the night carried on, contestants new and old battled fiercely in categories like “Realness” and “Beginners Runway” while an audience of eager spectators encircled them, cheering on the high-octane stunts and shows with exaggerated yaaas-es and approving finger-wags whenever someone executed a particularly sickening dip. The energy inside the packed room never let up, and throughout, JohVera was the one to keep everything (and everyone) in check.
It’s no wonder he has become such a fixture of New York’s ballroom scene. It might have taken him earning his “Legend” title in 2021 — at a special one-off OTA in Times Square, the first ball to be held there — to admit to himself, “Oh my god, I’m never going to be forgotten,” as he later tells me. But with his party only gaining more traction with each new week (just ask Madonna, Rosalía, or Lil Nas X, who’ve all made the trek to Brooklyn to get a taste of the immersive action), it’s clearer than ever that JohVera’s mark in the ballroom history books has been etched in permanent ink.
On this Friday, though, JohVera is feeling a little beat. He has just celebrated a birthday and, after months of planning, recently announced a special OTA event in Washington D.C. honoring civil rights leader Bayard Rustin as part of the capitol’s Equity March Weekend. When I meet him at the Christopher Street Piers, he’s sipping a blue Gatorade and trying to tie up loose ends for a still unannounced Pride event.
JohVera selected this location because it was one of the first places he “saw the gays around each other.” Like many, he initially learned about the Piers through Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s seminal 1991 documentary about the ballroom scene, in which the waterfront hangout served as a gathering ground for LGBTQ+ people of color looking to pass the time and find queer community. Naturally, when he moved to New York a decade ago, he made it a priority to see the splendor for himself. “It was the first moment where I started to get a full reality of what it is that I was stepping into, as it pertains to ballroom or whatever,” he reminisces. “I’ve seen girls sleep here. I’ve seen girls fight here… I feel like, honestly, this particular Pier should be a national landmark.”
Beyond Paris Is Burning, JohVera first caught wind of the ballroom scene in his late teens, after discovering voguing clips on the “rare part of YouTube” and learning the five elements of vogue from virtual friends he met through early-aughts social media networks like BGC. He finally got involved in the scene in 2010, when he moved from California to Baltimore and joined the House of West at the behest of his cousin, its founder. Still, at the time, ballroom was a fun side endeavor. During that same period, he was working a well-paying job at a “popular medical clinic,” living in a townhouse and feeling “fab and successful,” as he puts it. But after “making the wrong decisions with a lover,” he was fired. Unable to pay bills, JohVera lost everything.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been forced to pack up and start over. Raised as a military brat, JohVera was accustomed to transient living situations. “Military kids have this… I don’t know if I’d call it imposter syndrome, but there’s this thing of not really feeling like you belong, or [like you] have a cultural root,” he explains. But his situation drastically changed by the time he relocated to New York in 2013 — “not by choice,” he clarifies, “but for survival.” For over a year, he lived in a homeless shelter, relying on a combination of “escorting and bad decisions” to stay afloat.
Not surprisingly, it was ballroom that helped him back onto his feet. JohVera quickly joined forces with Qween Beat, the ballroom record label headed up by MikeQ, and started taking gigs as their commentator. He also found favor with the famed House of LaBeija.
At the mention of the LaBeijas, JohVera playfully rolls his eyes, but immediately doubles back that it’s all in good jest. The Legend had always wanted to join the House started by Crystal in the 1970s, recalling that when his ballroom dreams were still limited to rewatches of Paris Is Burning, “I would wait for the shower to fog up the mirror, and I would literally write ‘Leggoh LaBeija.’ I was that determined.” Alas, nothing lasts forever, and eventually, JohVera parted ways with the House. Today, he seems deliberately cagey about the minutiae of their dissolution, but he assures me, “Everything that people love about what I do now, the LaBeijas allowed me the space, even with my mistakes and all, to really find myself.”
Post-LaBeija, JohVera felt like he was “in purgatory with what I wanted to do with my life.” With Qween Beat, he was helping to run House of Vogue, a ball series at eccentric Bushwick venue House of Yes; for a while, he thought he would become a popular recording artist. “My goal was to make ballroom music its standalone thing, without us being grouped up with house music or electronic or techno or whatever,” he says. “But I did not know how I was going to get there.”
Oddly enough, it was Frank Ocean who gave him some perspective, in 2017, when he invited JohVera to host his headline-making, Paris Is Burning-themed 30th birthday bash. Getting flown out to Bel-Air by a Grammy-winning singer was eye-opening; suddenly, JohVera could see ballroom as a real path forward. He doubled down on his commitment to throwing and hosting vogue events — and in 2019, everything changed.
That was when Frankie Sharp, a popular nightlife producer JohVera considers a “fairy godbrother,” reached out to him about throwing a ball at 3 Dollar Bill, a Brooklyn venue for whom he had been doing programming. The ball never happened — in part because the fashion world sponsors they had secured pulled out after Karl Lagerfeld’s death — but, inspired by the ideas JohVera had been bringing to the table, Sharp did ask if he had any interest in taking over the free Monday night slot at the venue. Boom: OTA was born.
JohVera wanted his ball to provide something new for the scene. An acronym for “Open to All,” OTA sought to make everyone — established icons and curious neophytes alike — feel included inside its doors. JohVera pushed for OTA to promote the more welcoming side of the culture, offering a contrast to the often cutthroat and demanding nature of some of the city’s more traditionally minded balls. “I know what it feels like to be in a shelter and then get treated any kind of way on the ballroom floor,” he explains. “So I wanted to have that one space in ballroom that, like, wasn’t all of that.”
His vision quickly caught on, especially since it filled a gap in the market. As JohVera recalls, the long-running ball series Vogue Knights had been dark for “probably like four years” at the time he launched OTA, while House of Vogue only occurred once a month. In a city where ballroom seemed to be getting drowned out, the new weekly offering felt like a life-vest. “Going into it,” he says, “I already had — and I hate how this is going to sound — a very strong knowledge that it was going to work.”
Sharp agrees. “There’s a certain Pied Piper-ness one needs to be a long-lasting event producer, and I saw how the people around Leggoh naturally orbited around him,” he writes over email. “I knew he could turn this out as the one giving the marching orders, and boy, did he.”
Five years on, OTA is bigger than ever. In addition to the celebrity visitors — you can add MNEK, Big Freedia, and Doechii to the list — the brand’s reach has expanded well beyond the doors of 3 Dollar Bill, hosting balls in unprecedented locations like Times Square and the Guggenheim Museum, while partnering with everyone from Nike to Adidas to the Brooklyn Nets.
Of course, part of OTA’s growing popularity is linked to the shifting place that ballroom itself occupies in the wider culture. While Madonna’s “Vogue” (released the year JohVera was born) introduced many to this once-underground subculture in the 1990s, ballroom’s footprint has never been larger. These days, you can sweat it out in a voguing class at your local dance studio and then go home to binge an Emmy-winning FX series about internecine drama between houses. It’s a phenomenon that JohVera openly acknowledges gives him mixed feelings. “In all the years that ballroom has been mainstream,” he says, “everything has always had to be compromised.”
If there is a bright spot, it would have to be Renaissance, Beyoncé’s critically acclaimed seventh album, which paid tribute to the scene through both its sounds and its collaborators. “That was very surreal because, in my life, I’ve never experienced, outside of gospel music, an artist being able to understand some part of my existence,” JohVera says of the connection he felt to the record, tears beginning to well in his eyes. “Funny enough, the first time I heard ‘Heated,’ I cried. I was just like, ‘I can’t believe Beyoncé is commentating.’”
And that was before he got to actually be a part of the Renaissance era: while preparing for the box office-breaking film that documents the album’s accompanying tour, Parkwood Entertainment, Beyoncé’s management and production company, stopped by OTA to gather some footage that made it into the final cut. “I feel like Beyoncé has to be the most — and the only — authentic experience I have seen yet for us in media,” he says matter-of-factly. “Not Pose. Definitely not the fuck Legendary.”
His distaste for Max’s Legendary and FX’s Pose, arguably the two biggest ballroom-associated television series in history, is not without merit. He points out that Dominique Jackson, who played Pose’s fan-favorite shade master Elektra, was “the only real ballroom girl” in the main cast. And while he can’t deny the impact that Legendary had on the ballroom community members who competed (“I know that once you leave this show, you’re about to carry,” he admits), he wasn’t thrilled about the people who seemed to have the final word on essential decisions. “Tell me that a show’s being run by three white men without telling me that it’s being run by three white men,” he says of trying to watch it.
In his opinion, it’s all part of a gradual bastardization of the culture to which he’s dedicated his life. Just look at RuPaul’s Drag Race, where ballroom “dips” have been continually categorized as “death-drops.” “At this point, it’s intentional disrespect,” JohVera declares of their refusal to use the correct terminology. “Drag Race invited me in 2018 to do a panel discussion on appropriation and everything — all for them, two years down the line, to do the very same thing.”
He chalks up this failure to properly engage with ballroom’s rich history to capitalist greed. “Those of us who work in the industry, we know how these girls treat us,” he continues, a hint of defeatism now slipping through. “They really want us around, but just enough to where we can teach them, and then they move on and get their white counterparts to take the charge. And it always happens. Every. Fucking. Time.”
When it comes to the future of OTA — and of ballroom, at large — JohVera is determined to reclaim that power, putting it back into the hands of the very people who make this culture what it is. In another five years, he hopes OTA will be accepted as a legacy brand. (“I don’t feel like ballroom has ‘legacy brands’ yet,” he claims.) Though he’s secretive about his immediate plans — noting that he doesn’t “want to reveal what we’re working on for 2025” — JohVera does share a few big-picture dreams, like a touring version of OTA. “[I want] the girls to already know, ‘Alright, April’s coming up! Girl, it’s time to do auditions because OTA is going on tour,’” he says, a hopeful glint now noticeable in his voice. “That’s really what I want.”
Above all, JohVera wants to keep legitimizing ballroom in the wider culture. He’s quick to name-check people like Monica lead Trace Lysette, Star’s Amiyah Scott, Sports Illustrated cover star Leyna Bloom, and Renaissance Tour highlight Honey Balenciaga as proof of ballroom’s unique ability to spot stars and foster talent, but he envisions a future when even more of his peers are breaking through. It’s not too far-fetched. “I can now put what I do in ballroom on a résumé when that used to be a read,” he tells me. “It used to be, like, ‘Bitch, you can’t put that on a résumé…’ Yes, the fuck I can now!”
But what about his plans for himself? Several times throughout our conversation, JohVera expresses his desire to turn OTA into a well-oiled machine, one that could run itself even if he wasn’t there to guide it. So, as we near the two-hour mark of our interview and the winds along the Piers begin to pick up, I ask if he ever sees himself stepping away.
Before he can answer, he begins to cry again. (“You an emotional fuck, Leggoh,” he whispers to himself.) “Ballroom saved my life,” he says as he reaches for a napkin to wipe away a few rolling tears. “I have a career because of ballroom. I’m able to talk on the phone with my father, who is a devout Christian and retired soldier, [because of ballroom]. Ballroom has granted me so much in this world and I am forever grateful. So me? No. I could not.”
For JohVera, ballroom will always hold a personal significance. “I’ve had that experience of being in a shelter and dreaming,” he says. “Imagine dreaming in a space where you have nothing. You don’t have tables. You don’t have no chairs. Your bed that you lay on is literally on the floor, but you’re thinking, This is what I want.” He’s right, it’s near impossible to envisage. But sitting here today, years later, he’s proof that change is possible. “I don’t have to travel down the A-Train to go see that man for $40 anymore,” he announces proudly — and all he wants to do is make sure other people in his situation get the same shot at success. As he tells me through his tears, “I want to be the very thing that I wish I had coming up.”
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