JANET’S GOT A NEW GROOVE
ON AN OVERCAST WEDNESDAY MORNING IN LATE JULY, Janet Mock sat on location in a New York City highrise, pensively analyzing a major scene for Pose’s season two finale. Her conventional director’s chair—black and emblazoned with her name in pearly white—sat in a corner, abandoned for a far less commanding office chair at a long conference table. It was here that she was proverbially getting her hands in the weeds, vigilantly observing a monitor with the script supervisor, Claire Cowperthwaite. Mock gracefully swirls the retractable tip of a black pen towards the illuminated screen, around Indya Moore (one of the breakout stars of Pose who plays Angel Evangelista) and Trudie Styler (who plays modeling magnate Eileen Ford)—asking for a tighter camera shot on their faces.
“I remember my first day on the Pose set when we were shooting the pilot and we saw all of the House of Abundance together,” Mock says. “I was sitting at the monitors having that feeling—like I am that kid again, because I hadn’t seen it before.” That far-off dream of seeing a fuller version of herself has now become the budding television maven’s responsibility.
For the last hour on set, Moore (one of the figures who makes this mission possible) has been running through a highly choreographed scene requiring them to relive—with each take—the feeling of learning that they’ve been outed as transgender by a prominent fashion director.
This narrative is a familiar one for many trans women of color, season, Angel’s plotline blended elements of the real-life stories of Tracey Africa Norman (who found success as the face of Clairol in the 1970s before being outed on the set of an shoot) and Octavia St. Laurent (who placed a hopeful bid for one of Ford’s casting calls in the seminal queer documentary ). And for Moore—a young Black nonbinary trans person who has recently ascended to fame, in a world that Mock, in her own regard, has made more inviting for trans people throughout her career—the scene must have felt overwhelming.
