On one recent evening, competitors in scandalously sheer and outrageously bedazzled outfits shimmied for cash prizes in a West Baltimore community center.

Moving to a thumping bass beat, the dancers vogued, twisting their bodies into backbends before acrobatically falling to the floor. But the audience saved some of their loudest cheers of the night for one.

It was the woman with the sharp cheekbones and willowy height of a supermodel who simply strutted to the judge’s table, pausing only to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.

“The iconic one, Lisa Revlon!”

And the room exploded in screams.

Ballroom, a subculture built by LGBTQ+ Black and Latino communities, has gained popularity over the years for its extravagant dancing, posing and modeling competitions, as immortalized by Madonna’s hit song “Vogue,” the documentary “Paris Is Burning” and television series “Pose.”

But before all that, there was Revlon, one of the pioneers who helped bring ballroom to Baltimore. She remains a fixture in the local scene, mentoring generations of young talent through the decades.

“I brought all this madness here,” Revlon said recently from her home in Baltimore’s Penn North neighborhood.

Revlon has shared her story over the years with documentarians of LGBTQ+ culture, including Frédéric Nauczyciel, a French artist, and Joseph Plaster, the director of Johns Hopkins University’s Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center.

Six years ago, Revlon was a key interview for Plaster as he embarked on a project to document Baltimore’s ballroom scene for Hopkins’ oral history collection on local LGBTQ+ history.

The goal was “to make sure it’s not just the powerful who are having their histories recorded and remembered by future generations,” said Plaster, who has also highlighted other pioneers of Baltimore ballroom at celebrations held in the George Peabody Library.

In the 1980s, Revlon was among the first to bring ballroom from New York City to Baltimore — helping not only to host competitions but also to foster networks celebrating and protecting queer and transgender individuals and people of color. These chosen families, called “houses,” led by “fathers” and “mothers,” support many as they navigate life, love, and even epidemics of drug addiction and sexually transmitted diseases.

Long before Revlon took to the stage, she was an introverted child who always felt different from those around her, she said. She was assigned male at birth and lived in the Bronx until the third grade, when her family moved to Reisterstown.

Revlon, who declined to disclose her age, said when she was growing up, no one talked about different types of sexuality or gender identity. That education came from a library book she discovered over summer break in middle school, she said. Revlon said she now identifies as a “woman of difference,” instead of transgender, a modern term that wasn’t used when she was coming of age.

While visiting friends and family in New York City in 1989, Revlon began participating in balls and joined the House of Revlon, from which she adopted her surname.

That same year, the House of Revlon held Baltimore’s first documented ball at Club Fantasy, a short-lived but storied Howard Street dance venue. Performers began traveling between New York and Baltimore to compete.

With Revlon’s help, “people really started learning that Baltimore had some talented people here,” said Bam Ebony, who serves as the overall father of the House of Ebony, a ballroom family founded in New York with more than 300 members across the world.

Ebony said he first met Revlon through the ballroom scene in New York when he was a teenager running away from a religious family.

He said she was “someone you could always talk to” during that tumultuous time in his life. Years later, they met again in Baltimore, where she came to be known as “the big mama, big auntie, big sister of ballroom.”

“You can’t come into ballroom and not know Lisa in Baltimore,” Ebony said.

Ballroom‘s hard-partying culture can often involve sex and drugs, Revlon said. After it debuted in Baltimore, some young people became addicted to drugs or contracted HIV, a fact that weighs heavily on her, she said.

“I had no intentions for them to get caught up in stuff like that, but, again, it was a brand-new world and people was getting introduced to a lot of stuff they wasn’t exposed to before,” she said.

Over her lifetime, Revlon has been a wardrobe stylist, model, painter’s muse, an advocate for transgender rights, community health worker and even a drug trafficker, a role for which she had spent time in jail, court records show.

Today, Revlon describes herself as a “starving artist.” She lives in a modest two-story rowhome in Penn North, with her grandniece, her baby and a fluffy white dog. Though Revlon has never given birth, she has mothered and housed many young people trying to find their way. For a personal documentary project, she has been following neighborhood residents as they struggle with drug addiction, a disease that has claimed countless friends and family members.

Over time, ballroom has lost some of the magic that made it so special for Revlon. In her eyes, balls have become more focused on athleticism than artistry, valuing mimicry over originality. Though ballroom culture now has global reach, many clubs that once served as a safe space for queer Black Baltimoreans have shuttered, she said.

On that ballroom night in the West Baltimore community center, Revlon observed with dismay that more than half the room was empty.

But she didn’t let her disappointment show when she encountered 39-year-old Dearl Welborn in the bathroom. It had been nearly a decade since he had last vogued, he said, and wondered if he still had what it took to win.

Revlon, whom Welborn had first met as a teenager while questioning his own gender identity, gently encouraged him to follow his heart.

Armed with those comforting words, he took to the dance floor, spinning and dipping towards the judge’s table, eliciting cheers from onlookers.

After all, Revlon’s “an icon,” he said. “She’s been doing this before all of us.”