TV, you are really spoiling us at the moment. The world and its wife are in love with a celibate who drinks gin in a tin: the priest in Fleabag. And while I had thought the new BBC2 show Pose – a drama about 1980s New York ball culture – would fail to hold a candle to the documentary about that scene, Paris is Burning, I was happily very wrong.
Pose focuses on a fabulous scene involving different houses of queens and queers and transgender people, mostly black, and the challenges between the houses. In the first episode, the House of Abundance goes up against the House of Evangelista. Fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race will recognise executive realness and all those terms that have now become mainstream.
Pose retells recent history, and while my generation lived it, we need to keep teaching it. Lots of it made me cry. I lived in New York in the 80s and I did not know what I was crying for: my own past; that generation lost to Aids; the kindness of strangers? Maybe all those things and more. What was brought home so strongly and movingly to me was that now – at a time when there are protests about whether children should be “exposed” to LGBT “lifestyles” (exposure means contamination, make no mistake) – this was a story about family.
These balls and houses were not only about fabulousness as a form of resistance, but about family. The creation of families formed in the face of rejection from biological family.
Billy Porter’s character explains: “Houses are homes to the little boys and girls who never had one, and they keep coming every day.” The mother of the house picks up a boy sleeping rough and believes in him enough to get him into dance school. People dance on the piers even thought they know they are dying. Family is forged from pain and loss. Beneath the superficiality of Pose there is something deep. That thing is love.
