Packrat's Path to HBO's "Legendary" and Her Commitment to Breaking Down Barriers
The 31-year-old movement artist talks overcoming stigmas as a cisgender Black woman with natural hair, seeking to advance within the ballroom.
WHAT COLOR DEFINES PACKRAT?
Black. Throughout my journey as a Black person, I could not ever get away from my skin color.
I was raised on Black power. My mom was a junior Black Panther and continued in the movement as she got older. My dad was in the marines and struggled there as a Black man.
My aura, too, has always been about helping my people and my community. I never say I am African American because I refuse to pay Ancestry.com to give me my culture after raping me of my history.
I know I have Native ancestry and that of the Caribbean — my great grandparents were Native and Caribbean — but, I think like a Black person, I act like a Black person, and I look good in it.
“Are you ready for a show?” asks the host of HBO’s newest series “Legendary” in the official trailer. The ballroom world has maintained its own hub for artistry, technique, fashion, and movement infused drama — a hub movement artist, Packrat, knows all too well. Packrat joins “Legendary” under the House of Lanvin; one of the eight ballroom houses featured. Her pathway to HBO includes a wonderous app named Vine.
“I started #VogueSundays to just practice voguing online, then, it started to become a big thing and voguers started to see the videos and join in on the hashtag,” Packrat explains to Palette. “And they were surprised I could vogue and loved it — even though I was so trash back then in my opinion.”
During the days of Vine, the former six second video sharing app, 31-year-old Stephanie Whitfield, stage name Packrat, inspired a wave of young and old voguers through her own hashtag #VogueSundays.
Her videos showed her in various voguing movements — dips, hand circles, tuts, duck walks, and more — and helped instill positivity on the platform while broadcasting her talent to the world. Packrat’s choice to use Vine as a movement platform was birthed due to financial strain and her inability to pay for consistent dance classes.
She tells Palette about growing up in the lower-middle class, while advocating for her parents who, she says, always found a way to support herself and her siblings.
“If they didn’t have money for the ice cream truck, we would make popsicles in the house,” she says. “They were extremely resourceful so we never felt like we were struggling — even though we were. They really kept the kids, the kids.”
She credits her parents for allowing her to explore her talents and skills.
“As many extracurricular things we did, they made sure to be involved,” she says.
Packrat was born in Philadelphia but quickly moved with her family to Willingboro, New Jersey — a town Packrat says started as a white people-centric town before Black people moved in.
“The funny thing is now my sister is a councilwoman in the town and president of the NAACP chapter,” Packrat says.
Her family moved to New Jersey due to gun violence and police brutality in Philly.
“We lived next to the projects. One time, my brother, sister, and I were on the corner playing and almost got shot. At that point, my mom said we had to leave,” Packrat says. “My dad had just got out of the military too and so it was good timing. My parents worked their butts off for a house instead of an apartment in Jersey. While I claim both Philly and Jersey, I'm honestly a Jersey girl.”
In high school, Packrat joined in various movement-related extracurricular activities — a choice she says helped her strengthen her dance skills for free. She joined her high school’s step team, dance team, started in cheerleading, and more. The bulk of her lessons came from dancing on street corners and with different dance crews.
“You just would go to a street corner or someone’s garage where everyone was dancing and back then it was a natural culture,” Packrat says. “A lot of [the dance lessons] came from being out and about. Some other cities had dodgeball [sessions] and so I guess [dance] was our dodgeball.”
She continues, “I started as a street dancer doing hip-hop, freestyles, Jersey club, Baltimore club, Afro dance, popping, locking, and tutting; as I got older, my mom finally enrolled me in a ballet class.”
Around the age of 15 or 16, the same age Packrat began taking ballet classes, she also started to wander into the scene of gay clubs and bars. This wandering further pushed her into the world of voguing and ballrooms — a world she did not expect to do for so long.
“I started dabbling with ballroom in 2006. I started to get a lot of gay friends and they would invite me to go to clubs and I would always say I wasn’t old enough,” Packrat remembers through laughs. “There was this one club in Philadelphia called The B.C., The Breakfast Club, and they would go there, but being young, you know, I’m not supposed to be going anywhere without my parents.”
Packrat did not let that stop her and rather snuck out of her parent’s home one night and borrowed her sister’s I.D. card — without her sister’s knowledge. She would cross over the bridge connecting the two areas and be on her way.
“I got to the club and saw people slamming their backs on the ground and I was like, ‘What is this?’ I asked one of the people dancing to teach me and they did,” Packrat says.
As she describes, in the early 2000s, no one in her circle really knew the technicalities of voguing but rather would emulate its shadows. Packrat did not mind though, as she says she was just happy to be a part of their world.
“And so I started sneaking out even more to the clubs — one, in particular, being Woodys,” Packrat says. “But then the gay clubs started being shut down and targeted by police.”
Too in love with the world of ballroom to stop, Packrat turned to Youtube to continue her lessons, where she discovered New York’s ballroom scene and became consumed with admiration. Without the boom of social media, Packrat says finding ballrooms was a daunting task.
“It was word of mouth and through using physical flyers and passing them out in clubs. You had to put in the leg work,” Packrat says.
Of the ballrooms she would find, Packrat would attend them either as an onlooker or as a performer. Though she says her performances were not met with as much enthusiasm back then.
“I got booed a lot. They were like, ‘Get her off the floor!’ So, I got discouraged,” Packrat says. “Since this was around the time I was leaving for college, I took a hiatus from the ballroom and voguing and focused on college instead.”
Packrat describes the struggle of being a woman within the ballroom scene throughout our interview. She says this struggle is made worse by being a Black ciswoman within the scene as well.
“Black ciswomen have the hardest job when it comes to ballroom,” Packrat says. “International girls have the money to come learn. A lot of them see it as the dance style and not a culture. It’s the same reality of what it's always been in America.”
She explains the ballroom is not exempt from colorism saying, “The lighter your skin the easier it is.” Darker-skinned Black women have to be ten times as good as their lighter-skinned competitors to get a fighting chance, Packrat says.
“And I also have my natural hair. My hair doesn't fling as their hair flings, I don't get that drama if my hair is in afro puffs,” Packrat says. “Unless I wear a wig, that dramatic flip won’t be achieved. The hair element is big in queen culture and a lot of Black women aren't going to be able to achieve it. [Judges] too don’t see the level of effort as much as they do for European women.”
The other element of limitation is how cisgender women are also viewed within the scene.
“Ballroom is an overexaggerated version of the female body. It’s an over sexual and sensual version of being a cisgender female,” Packrat says. “A lot of people, as a cisgender female, they feel like we don’t fully appreciate the culture. Some transgender and queer people have problems in their lives that stem from cisgender women.”
Those problems include cisgender women denying transgender and queer women their womanhood, Packrat says.
“This is all from my experience in talking with transgender women and transgender men,” Packrat says.
So, she took a break from the scene but, as the saying goes, “what is meant to be will be.” While attending college, Packrat started to notice more videos trending from ballrooms — the social media boom had happened and it highlighted more and more from the scene. Another thing Packrat noticed, there were more women at the function.
“I saw the women and I saw judges and those in the ballroom were not being as tough on the women as they were when I would attend,” Packrat says. “This got me inspired and got me wanting to practice more and that is when I started #VogueSundays on Vine.”
By 2012, Packrat was back in the ballroom scene and walking in functions. As she became more intertwined with the scene, she started to solidify herself within it and made some friends along the way.
“I moved from New Jersey to LA a few months after graduating college and so I had more time to put out more vogue content,” Packrat says. “Dashaun Wesley I remembered from The B.C. and ‘America’s Best Dance Crew.’ He reached out to me during this and asked if I wanted to train with him.”
Packrat explains she had just packed her entire life, with very few savings, and moved to LA. So instead, Wesley came to her.
“We became best friends. I always call him an older brother and my vogue father,” Packrat says.
After some time together, Wesley eventually asked Packrat what she wanted to do in her future. Packrat says voguing was not a world she ever saw herself making money from.
“Voguing was nowhere on the radar. I didn't even see it as part of my career,” Packrat says. “But [Wesley] got me to see potential and I’m not someone who closes any doors that open to me.”
The name Packrat, publicized on Vine, stayed with her. It was also a name selected by her mother.
“I was nervous to keep it because I didn’t want people to just start calling me a rat but my mom said when it came to my knowledge and being smart, I always learned things easily, like a rat,” Packrat says. “So I set it as my name and it stuck and I've been Packrat ever since. I became Packrat the voguer.”
HBO’s “Legendary,” Packrat says, is a show three years in the making. It was not until the beginning of December when Packrat finally received the official call for it. She hopped on a flight, and the rest is now streaming on HBO Max.
Looking to the future, Packrat says whatever she does she hopes to give back to the community.
“I want to create a space to open up to the Black and Latino community, where they don't always have to pay money to learn how to dance,” Packrat says. “I also want to be more vocal about Black women and Black queer women in the scene.”
She continues, “And to be more vocal about the vogue culture and hair. It’s harder for darker-skinned people to win because judges hold them to European standards. I’d like to break down the barriers of the ballroom.”
Packrat says she has no exact plan for where she’s headed but the ride to that destination is what she’s here for.