With Pose, Prestige TV Becomes Resistance TV
Early in FX’s new scripted melodrama Pose, Blanca, a HIV-positive trans performer, introduces Damon, a gay youth from Pennsylvania, to the glamour and volume of ballroom culture. "Realness is what it’s all about," she tells him as they watch participants compete in the category for "Executive Realness." Having fled the choke of home, Damon (played with innocence and fire by Ryan Jamaal Swain) has come to New York City with dreams of becoming a professional dancer. "Isn’t that what you’re trying to do?" Blanca (MJ Rodriguez) continues. “Dance your way into the world, the world of acceptability?”
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Of course, 1987 New York ball culture was often met with the cruel bite of prejudice, and everything that arose out of it—the gloss of drag, the drama of voguing, its stories of triumph and togetherness—was relegated to the underground, a secret to those only in the know. In the hands of creators Steven Canals and Ryan Murphy, TV again struts ever forward; the two are serving up a bold, decadent, delicious thing.
TV can sometimes give the illusion of inclusivity, but with Pose, which premieres Sunday, the medium gets a first: a scripted musical drama about black and Latin trans and queer performers in the New York ball scene. Set against the backdrop of Reaganomics and the dawn of the AIDS crisis, Blanca is a sparkplug with something to prove. She’s up from under the heelprint of her former "house mother" and nemesis Elektra (a fabulously sinister Dominique Jackson) and set on forming her own ballroom crew. (A ballroom crew, or House, operates like an informal club where members, shunned from their former lives, live and compete together against other Houses.)
Naturally, Pose has all the hallmarks of a Murphy endeavor: spice, shock, and a taste for maximalism. His are characters hemmed in by storms with racial and emotional intensities, people who eventually wash ashore and fight to make a way home. There’s Angel (Indya Moore), whose arc is particularly engrossing for the way it tangles desire and love into a counter image of traditional beauty: a trans Latin woman is fashioned into a patriarchal ideal. For all her venom, Elektra is also rendered with humanness. "I don’t feel incomplete, I just feel inconvenienced," she confesses to a ball performer about wanting to get gender confirmation surgery, despite the misgivings of her rich benefactor. "I’m tired of living in this in-between for him." Murphy’s 1980s metropolis has themes aplenty—nightlife segregation, body abjection, the thrall of the AIDS epidemic—and he does his very best to juggle them with care and vibrancy. In other words, Pose is a gaudy statement piece with more than enough heart to go around.
These days we talk a good deal about Prestige TV, but maybe what we should be talking about is Resistance TV—shows that buck not just traditional narratives about race, gender, and class, just as Pose does, but ones that employ those same marginalized communities behind the camera, in the writers rooms, and in executive suites. Canals, who identifies as a cisgender Afro-Latinx queer man, and Murphy have applied that mood in full to their show. According to Murphy, Pose employed 108 trans cast and crew members, 31 LGBTQ characters, and a number of trans directors. Janet Mock, a trans author and activist, worked in the writers room and wrote what will likely be one of the season’s most talked about episodes ("The Fever"). "It's television as advocacy," Murphy told The New Yorker in May.
Still, Pose is not the first look inside ballroom culture. A more recent snippet came during the season one finale of Baz Luhrmann’s short-lived Netflix series The Get Down. Dizzie (Jaden Smith) visits an undisclosed ball in SoHo and stumbles into a world of wonder and revelry. "What is this place?" he asks, and is met with a response that’s all the more savory because of the liberty laced in its truth: "It's where the free people are free."
That scene, and perhaps every other one that portrays drag and ball culture, owes a sliver of its authenticity to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which chronicled the lives of contestants who sought fame, love, and respect from their peers in the underground scene (the counter movement had been going on in Harlem long before Livingston arrived, though scarcely captured on tape). The documentary was an outlier at a time when visions of black and Latin queerhood were essentially nonexistent on TV and in film. It was drag, which has roots in and out of ball competitions, that was eventually granted a podium on TV, in 2009, with RuPaul’s competition show Drag Race. Having quietly stewed during its early days, the reality TV series underwent a complete pop metamorphosis—eventually becoming a cultural engine and bankable hit.
Under sumptuous, champagne lighting, the theatre of self-invention became a thing of regal, wanted beauty. "A ball is the very word—whatever you want to be, you be," one attendee affirms in Livingston’s doc. "At a ball, you have the chance to display your arrogance, your seductiveness, your beauty, your wit, your charm. You can become anything and do anything—right here, right now."
Though balls continued, their relevance in the mainstream never truly caught on, relegated to oral histories and academic texts. Viceland’s recent docu-series My House picks up where Livingston concluded—offering viewers an intimate snapshot of contemporary NYC ball life. In its debut from April, top competitor Tati 007, a Latina with long blond hair like Rapunzel, is without a House and looking to make a stamp at the high-stakes Coldest Winter Ever Ball. "Every time I walk I bring some drama to the floor,"she says as footage of her performance overtakes the screen—her weave whipping the air in two, her sharp, sudden movements summoning the richness and power of voguing.
Resistance TV comes in many forms, and this most recent version gives us an opportunity to better understand not just the history of drag and ball culture, and the lives of its trans and queer performers, but how it too can be a vessel for expanding notions of tolerance and identity. Pose, along with My House and Drag Race, welcomingly resists neat compositions; they are shows that loudly and proudly hint at a vision of what TV has the capacity to become. Maybe Blanca had it right all along—all the people want is realness.