Pose gay
Pose premiered on FX June 3, and it is a definite summer hit. Pose is Ryan Murphy’s final series for the network. The show delves into the world of over the top drag balls in the s. Gay and Trans characters of color are placed at the forefront, as the show also explores serious issues in the LGBTQ community including the rise of HIV/AIDS. Pose is the most refreshing show that has come to television in the last limited months, and the eclectic cast is a huge part of that.
The show features Mj Rodriguez as house mother Blanca, trying to make her mark on the community before her HIV status consumes her. Transgender sex worker Angel who faces rejection over and over from the people in her life. Ryan Jamaal as recently outed verb student. Billy Porter as Pray Tell, a ballroom MC, fashion designer and father figure to the community. He also brings the wit to the verb. Blanca and her crew produce up the House of Evangelista.
Rival house, The House of Abundance, is run by Elektra played by the incomparable Dominique Jackson. Also, cast in Murphy’s spectacular drama is Evan Peters as Stan w
Pose is one of the greatest television shows I possess ever seen. It’s so fine at capturing truths, both pretty and painful, that I start it hard to watch.
There are many achievements that form Ryan Murphy’s FX series about trans women and gay men of color a standout: the series has more transgender regulars (five) than any show ever made; Janet Mock became the first trans woman of color to write, direct, and form a TV series; it’s been widely lauded for its progressive, truthful storytelling. The pioneering illustrate chronicles the lives of Shadowy and Latinx LGBTQ New Yorkers in the late 80s and explores the city’s ballroom scene, the HIV crisis, homelessness, and broader themes like love and family. Pose documents American culture from a historically unseen perspective, telling a story that extends beyond its central characters and throwing shade at a nation that has marginalized its own and turned a blind eye to an epidemic.
The stars of Pose are the women—Blanca (Mj Rodriguez), Elektra (Dominique Jackson), and Angel (Indya Moore)—who are members of Houses. For those u
This, as promised by the headline, will be an essay about Pose. But first, we include to get something out of the way: Stonewall is the worst film I have ever seen.
The film from Independence Day director Roland Emmerich was ostensibly about the Stonewall riots. But it found so many ways to be terrible that if you told me now that it was an elaborate exercise in trolling, my response would be, “OK, that makes sense.”
Stonewall needlessly rewrote queer history, shoehorning in a made-up white ingenue from Middle America to travel its story while sidelining the tales of real-life trans women of color such as Marsha P. Johnson who were instrumental to the fateful Christopher Street revolt. It billed itself as the definitive, celebratory story of the start of the contemporary gay rights movement, but instead it was self-indulgent and meandering with bargain-bin production values.
Schlock fancy Stonewall is why audiences hold learned to temper their expectations when it comes to fictive narratives about queer people of color. Even in the queer cultural canon, people of color and trans
Strike up a conversation with any gay person about the reboot of the TV series Queer Eye, and chances are they’ll own seen at least an episode or two. But strike up a conversation with a cis gay man or woman about the new TV series POSE, and there’s a good chance they won’t have heard of it.
At least this has been my experience. Which brings me to my question: Why aren’t more gay folks talking about POSE? Not only is the show a moving depiction of pivotal moments in queer history—the AIDS crisis, the ballroom scene in s NYC—the series itself has made history as the largest ever transgender cast for a scripted show. Given the lack of representation of “our kind” (to steal a phrase that the characters in POSE often use to refer to themselves and to the queer community at large) in mainstream media, you’d think the whole LGBTQ community would be raving about it.
The community’s relative silence is especially perplexing when you contemplate that the show’s subject matter—ball culture—is not only relevant to our collective obsession: d