‘Aspirational and hopeful,’ Pose looks to strike a chord
TV series creator says show celebrates ‘incredible souls’
NEW YORK — In the premiere episode of the new FX series Pose, a young black man hoping to be a star modern dancer is escorted into his first drag ball. Wild-eyed, he eagerly soaks it in. It makes him speechless.
In front of him are members of his fellow LGBTQ community dressed in high-fashion finery, strutting down a runway with glamour and confidence as their friends cheer. It is 1987 in a gritty part of New York hit hard by crack and AIDS, yet this is an act of defiance.
“We are not going to be walking the red carpet at the Oscars but this is our moment to become a star,” our aspiring dancer is told by his escort. “Balls are a gathering of people who are not welcome to gather anywhere else.”
Pose, dreamed up by newcomer Steven Canals and ushered into production by mega-producer Ryan Murphy, acts as our escort into a world that has never been celebrated on TV before, starring the largest LGBTQ cast ever for a scripted series.
“The fact that this incredible community of black, brown queer and trans people could find a way to create community and family and survive in the face of poverty, disease and violence just astounded me,” Canals said. “So Pose really came out of not only wanting to write a love letter about New York, but also a way to just pay homage to these incredible souls.”
Canals, who was born in the South Bronx, came across the balls in his 20s and wrote the original draft of Pose in 2014 at UCLA. When he tried to get it made, he faced plenty of resistance from TV executives.
“There were execs who were just blatantly transphobic and racist, who were like, ‘The show is too queer, too trans, too black, too brown. It’s a period piece, and you don’t have a name, so no one is ever going to make this.’”
While some of the topics are heavy — drugs, AIDS and even anti-trans bigotry at the hands of white gay men — the creators have built the series on optimism and the universal yearning to create a family.
“It needed to be aspirational and hopeful, because we’ve never seen people like this occupy space in television, ever. We didn’t want to create this bleak, baroque version of New York,” said Canals. “And yet we still wanted to be true to the time period. So we made sure that we centred
and grounded the narrative in the theme of family and ambition and survival.”
Reviews have been positive. The New York Times called it a “boisterous, resplendent drama,” while NBC called it “the best network family drama of 2018.” Variety said: “There’s simply never been a show on TV quite like Pose.”
The drama contains multiple overlapping stories,
including the ballroom rivalry between houses run by very different den mothers (Mj Rodriguez and Dominique Jackson). Ryan Jamaal Swain plays the dancer who learns about this subculture.
There is also a social-climbing businessman (Evan Peters) who falls in love with Angel (Indya Moore), a transgender prostitute. And there’s Billy Porter, winner of a Tony
Award for wearing 34-inch red leather boots in Kinky Boots, who plays the balls’ organizer and MC.
Porter, who was studying at Carnegie Mellon in 1987, said he never expected to see his own story on national television. He called it “the greatest job of his life” and hopes people will tune in to open their minds.
“Americans didn’t watch Will & Grace because it was about gay people. They watched it because it was good. They watched it because it was great,” he said. “If you get an education, so be it. If you don’t, it’s still great.”
If anything, Pose is an education into the world and language that would influence Madonna, the seminal 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, and RuPaul’s Drag Race.
If you get an education, so be it. If you don’t, it’s still great.”
Actor Billy Porter