For many people, ballroom culture exists only in Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's 1991 documentary. But for Newark's MikeQ (Michael Cox), who is only a few years older than the movie, it's a lifestyle. Heavily involved with the East Coast scene since his teenage years, he's risen the ranks to arguably become ballroom's most outwardly visible figure. He's also a respected and adventurous producer, with reams of bootleg edits, an EP on Fade To Mind and a new label on the way.

But let's back up. What is ballroom? Having existed in various forms for at least four decades, ballroom is a New York-centric, primarily black and gay dance culture in which extravagantly dressed dancers battle it out over flamboyant beats, famously romanticized in the late '80s by artists like Malcolm McLaren ("Deep in Vogue") and Madonna ("Vogue").

During the late '80s and '90s, the music that soundtracked these parties evolved into its own distinctive mutant strain. Disco tracks like Diana Ross's "Love Hangover," any number of Salsoul Orchestra tunes and some classic house cuts defined the ballroom sound at its peak of popularity, but the music today is rough, quick and repetitive. This aesthetic is perfectly captured by Masters At Work's 1991 smash "The Ha Dance," particularly the "Pumpin Dubb" with its aggressive but buoyant thrust.

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The distinctive "ha!" has become a hallmark for ballroom, but its repetitive attack is merely a blueprint for artists like Cox to experiment with. When it crosses with hip-hop and Jersey club music, which is similarly hyperactive and sample-heavy, the lines become blurred. Ballroom has a unique flamboyance and insular slang, from terms like voguing to more obscure words such as "cunty."

There's a vital social impetus attached to ballroom culture, underlining its origins in heavily marginalized groups. Put on by "houses" that compete with each other for glitz and glamour, it's a family-style affair that prizes community and inclusion above all else. The houses provide crucial support for people who are often abandoned or disowned by their own families and social circles, and the balls offer a space for self-expression and performance art still considered taboo—or at least distasteful—by other sections of society. "Houses—well, I'd compare them to ballroom fraternities," Cox says. "They have house parents—mothers and fathers who oversee the house, whether they give the members a place to stay or just support in any way, whether that's in real life or ballroom life."

Cox got his start with ballroom at a Newark institution called The Globe, which ran a ballroom night for over a decade but has since ended. His experiences there made him hungry for this new music, which was much different from the more macho, hip-hop-oriented Jersey club music he had grown up with, and which spoke to him more as a young gay man. The desire for more of what he describes as "different, and sped up" beats inspired him to try his hand at producing tracks.

"A friend of mine had brought some programs over—just ACID Pro and FruityLoops—and he didn't really know how to use them, so I just started playing around with them myself," he says. "I started to make my own ballroom tracks. And I started putting them on—uh, it was a forum that was out back then, and that's where the whole community would go and talk. I put my tracks up there and got heard by everybody, and then I would start taking them to the clubs where other DJs would play my tracks. They weren't even that good, but most of the ones I hated back then a lot of people did like, weirdly."

Less than two years after his first brush with ballroom, when Cox was 18, he played his first DJ gigs, including a stint at The Globe and another at The Clubhouse in Harlem. He had a rough start: he was so nervous and intimidated by the parties that he would premix his sets, which at that point were mostly hip-hop. In those early days, Cox's own personal preference for the more extreme end of the ballroom sound still left him as a bit of an outlier. "When I first started going out, the DJ would only play three ballroom tracks. It was a lot more Jersey club and hip-hop, the main thing of those parties," he says.

As his stature grew, Cox became a fixture at Manhattan's Vogue Knights, one of the East Coast's biggest ballroom parties. Founded by MCs Jack Mizrahi and Luna Kahn, Vogue Knights was a place where people would practice before heading out to "real balls," lending the whole thing a more casual and welcoming air. "I've seen everybody come there," says Cox, "Boys Noize, Queen Latifah, [That's So Raven star] Raven Symone. It's not quite a ball but it's the same setup, just a smaller weekly form. It starts at 10 PM, I play a mix of beats until 2 or 3 AM and then they turn the lights on and do a few categories for a cash prize or something."

The real balls are less frequent and happen throughout the country. It's a traditional model that Cox is less directly involved with. He represents a younger and newer perspective on the idea, less purist and more open-minded about the music, a trait that bleeds into his own productions.

Cox's first official release was the excellent Let It All Out EP. It came out on Fade To Mind, a label run by Kingdom, another gay producer with a knack for blending US club styles. "We had DJ'd at a party together for an artist in NYC, and he played a few of my tracks that night," he says. "We talked, and once he was getting Fade To Mind together he asked me if I wanted to release an EP. That's like my number one musical family. And Night Slugs, and Qween Beat—it's one whole big family. Everybody there is sincere, and loves and supports one another."

Leading with a track called "The Ha Dub ReWork'D," Cox's debut EP had a traditionalist streak, but didn't rely too heavily on clichés. "I don't ever feel like I need to update anything or make anything futuristic, but when I sit there I just randomly do different things," he explains. "I would like to get out of the whole 'ha' thing. It's definitely a staple in our music, but that's not all the music is."

Despite his relatively small number of official releases, a healthy appetite for bootleg remixes (perhaps inspired by Jersey club's penchant for making beats out of R&B and hip-hop) keeps Cox in the public eye and in DJ bags. This year alone he's twisted M.I.A.'s "Y.A.L.A.", Rocko's rap smash "U.O.E.N.O" and Romanthony's "Bring You Up" into Jersey-ballroom hybrids. These unofficial remixes and his Fade To Mind EP make it clear why Cox's sound is so attractive to so many. His tracks are hard and made strictly for the club, but he cherishes the bits of melody in his sample material, and has his own sense of humour that makes the whole package irresistible.

A crossover artist like Cox attracts a more diverse crowd to ballroom. "It's still predominantly a gay thing," Cox says, "but, you know, with people hearing about the culture they're starting to come out and visit themselves. It's getting a little mix-y. You don't see too many of those people really go out and walk the balls, but they do come to some parts and spectate and stuff."

This mix is something that Cox has been increasingly vocal about on his social media accounts, quick to criticize those latching onto ballroom culture because it's suddenly trendy or those who don't realize its history or its social and sexual implications. In conversation, however, he's more levelheaded. "I don't mind it," he says. "I think everybody should know about it... I don't know how good that is, but I like to see it and that it's getting out there to a broader audience.

"I don't mind other producers doing it," he adds. "I don't have the 100% say to tell somebody not to do it, but I would just like whoever's doing the music to know about the culture, and who, what, how and why—all that stuff. Or at least to have come to a ball and know why the music is made the way it is, and what it's used for exactly, and how people actually dance to it. It's not just using the sounds and putting them on the track. I do like to hear what other producers can do with the music, and, you know, some of them have made tracks that I can actually take back to the scene and play them."

Interest in ballroom and Cox's music isn't limited to the US. Cox's stories of touring Europe, where people don't necessarily know how the dancing is supposed to work, echo tales of the early footwork tours around Europe. "Mainly, people just take it as another type of dance music, and they dance to it," he says. "Sometimes they look a little weird, but I usually mix the ballroom style in with some house or Jersey club, so it's taken pretty well."

With such an accessible and open-minded take on the sound, Cox has become a spokesperson for the scene almost accidentally. "It's weird, because even a lot of people working in the culture itself don't know about a lot the stuff I do," he admits. "But the DJ is not the super most important thing in the culture, as much as just coming out and doing the parties. I'm on the flyers—my face is—and people do come to actually see me. So I guess I'm the face of it in some way—at least the music."

Cox insists that the true attraction of ballroom is the competition, the dance floor—the music is just a soundtrack. And yet, by carrying name power to the gigs he plays, he's starting to turn that perception around.

With his new Qween Beat label, he'll shed light on other artists under the same umbrella. "It was just something that started as a name to put my music under. It was unofficial back then but I started adding people on. The first person was Gregg Evisu, who is just an MC at balls. We started making tracks together and putting them out under that name. Eventually I just started adding more and more people... now I have 14 members. There are producers, DJs, dancers, there's a guy that does video editing. One girl is in Japan and she has a class and another guy, Dashaun, goes around doing vogue classes. Everyone is talented in some kind of way, and we'll be debuting within the next year."

With an international gigging schedule that gets busier every month, Cox uses his time at home in Newark, where he says there's not much of anything going on anymore, to produce new tracks, a learning process that he hasn't mastered. "Everything that I do know is just from stuff I learned myself. I never got any training," he says, "I never read anything, so I just get better pretty much by the day. There are tracks I can produce in a day, but others take weeks, and some I've been working on for years. By now, I have a bit built up, so I'll be releasing another EP on Fade To Mind and I've been doing a lot of remixes and stuff which are already out. So, I mean, it's getting better. I wouldn't say it's the best yet, but I'm getting there."

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Ten years into his involvement in a small and insular scene, Cox's interest hasn't waned one bit. And ballroom culture is evolving. "You've got people from way back in the day that participate in it who are like icons and legends and pioneers, all the way down to younger people who are in their teens. There's two separate scenes now: the regular ball scene which everyone participates in, and the kiki scene which is the younger kids. Even still, what caught me from the beginning was just the music, and the dance—that right there is really interesting to see, and I've made a lot of friends in the scene. Being gay, I guess those are my people. You go there, you're comfortable with people like you, and you have fun."