Recent Viewing: Pose

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As part of my attempt to do a deep dive into the African-American experience by reading and watching a variety of texts during Black History month, I have been watching the television show Pose. The imdb entry summarizes the show as "In the New York of the late 80s and early 90s, this is a story of ball culture and the gay and trans community, the raging AIDS crisis and capitalism."

I appreciate a number of things about this show:

• It captures a moment in time in New York city that was very different than the New York of more recent years. This version of New York is NOT the post Rudy Guliani gentrified New York filled with tourists coming to see Broadway shows.
  
• It shows that the experience of being queer or trans in New York in that time period was very different in the African American community than it was in the white gay community.
• Similar to the movie Boogie Nights -- a movie about the porn industry in the late 1970s -- Pose shows that even though the members of this community were marginalized and vulnerable, they literally formed families to protect each other.
• The balls -- which are in every episode I have seen so far -- have a tremendous amount of time and work put into the costumes and the dances.