That scene — centered on glittery modeling competitions in which the participants, largely black, Latinx and queer, compete in different categories on the femme-butch spectrum — was begging for a big-budget screen treatment, and on that front Pose delivers. The show, which premiered June 3, is an unabashed pleasure trip, full of sumptuous costumes, needling zingers and tender performances.
In contrast to Paris is Burning’s sweat and grit, Pose, which is set in 1987, offers a glossier, more aspirational version of this queer subculture thriving in the shadows of Reagan’s America. The story centers on Blanca Rodriguez (MJ Rodriguez), who, at the series’ start, discovers she’s HIV positive and decides to leave the House of Abundance and start one of her own. (Her “house” is the team she competes
From the very first scene, Pose boasts a purposefully slick veneer of artificiality — it’s a little too art-directed, a romanticized version of poverty straight from the set of Rent. Blanca’s initial home, the House of Abundance, is located in a sprawling loft dotted with pink couches over which various drag queens drape themselves. Its ruler is house mother Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson), a stately presence who says things like, “Shush children, and let your mother speak.”
That unreal facade is perhaps thematically appropriate; Pose is about a subculture that rewards the ability to fake it. It’s also about the lies people tell to maintain a certain image. The strongest plot concerns Angel and her lover Stan (Evan Peters), a nascent Wall Street power broker with a wife and two young children in the suburbs. The straight world may consider Angel a freak of nature, but for Stan, Angel is more “real” than the world he comes from — one that values wealth accumulation at the cost of everything else, happiness included. (Because there are no safe spaces for viewers these days, Stan works at Trump Tower.)
There’s plenty in Pose to applaud:
Pride Month is upon us, and maybe all you want from this show is a moving soundtrack peppered with some cultural history. There’s value in seeing this material rendered as
Not that I’m craving one more scene in which a queer sex worker suffers at the hands of an insecure straight man. There’s a welcome subversive element to Pose’s refusal to cater to that cliché, especially in the way the show’s directors film a love scene between Damon and Ricky, or Stan and Angel’s first night in a motel together, just as they might any hetero romance: soft lighting, camera angles that suggest but don’t explicitly show sex. That motel scene in particular, from the first episode, feels like a revelation — the outstanding Indya Moore would excite any unsuspecting straight man in a heartbeat. There’s something quietly revolutionary in how gorgeous many of these trans women are, and how they’re given the chance to take up so much space (and time; did I mention how long these episodes are?) on screen.
But that soft-focus approach also renders Pose a rather fluffy confection. There’s a lot at stake for these characters, but the show frosts over the roughest edges. And, ironically, it lacks the kind of formative ingenuity that made the drag ball scene such a rich and lasting cultural phenomenon. The series rests on the strength of its characters and the wonderful performers who embody them and make the viewer care about their struggles and desires. In that sense, Pose succeeds. But it’s disappointing that the creators seem content to stop there — to simply create a sequin-studded world and populate it with people we can root for. It seems to me the kind of viewer who would watch Pose in the first place is already rooting for those people. If you’re already preaching to the choir, you might as well let your song ring out.
Pose airs Sundays on FX.