Elektra (Dominique Jackson), a powerful, tall trans woman navigating nineteen-eighties Donald Trump’s New York, uses her sculpted beauty to snag a sugar daddy who keeps her in luxury with a large weekly allowance, a penthouse suite and all the expensive gifts she can beg for. Her daddy makes it clear that he is buying what he wants; she is free to enjoy his lavishings so long as she doesn’t proceed with the gender affirming surgery that she desires so heart achingly. She, in turn, uses the money to buy herself her own reign of terror over a house of marginalised ethnic minority gay, trans and gender non-conforming people who live, as does she, for the glory to be found in the New York’s ball subculture. If this is all getting a little confusing you really need to watch the classic documentary, Paris is Burning, to glimpse the importance of ball culture for New York’s most marginalised queer and ethnic minority kids in those years. Anyway, back to Elektra. She taunts, belittles the ‘children’ of her house, using her power to practically enslave them into treating her like a queen. The money, power and shit all roll down hill.
FX’s new show Pose is a timely peek into a mostly forgotten world. The participants in these balls were all too aware that they lived for a culture of their own making because they would never be accepted by the mainstream…
