Strike a Pose: Why Ryan Murphy’s new show about voguing is TV at its most fearless
In the spring of 2002, an 11-year-old child actor from Newark, New Jersey went to see the new Spider-Man film. Looking up at the screen, this young viewer was less taken with Tobey Maguire’s friendly, neighbourhood superhero and more with his love interest, Kirsten Dunst’s character, Mary Jane “MJ” Watson. “I was like: ‘Why are they calling her MJ? Oh, Mary Jane,’” recalls the 27-year-old actor MJ Rodriguez. “I actually have those initials in my name. She’s a girl, and she has those initials? OK. So, I just put them up to my name.”
When it comes to screen epiphanies, Rodriguez – who was born a boy, but has been a trans woman for all her adult life – knows that the adoption of her two-letter handle is only a minor alteration. Changing lives and offering knowledge via a compelling on-screen presence is something Rodriguez and her fellow cast members in the new TV show Pose are intimately familiar with; they have been doing it all summer long.
Their hit new TV series, which premiered on 21st Century Fox’s FX channel at the beginning of June, to The Crown to Glow. There are fabulous costumes, fabulous music and fabulously outmoded social mores. However, unlike the ad-office bum slaps of those mid-century TV programmes, the hypocrisy that Pose highlights still feels remarkably fresh, perhaps because it’s only set in the recent past – New York City in the late 1980s – and maybe also because plenty of the behaviour that this show holds up as abhorrent really wasn’t viewed as that bad, even a few years ago.
