I have made it plain on this column I never liked nor had any use for Sex & the City. I didn’t like it when it was on the air or in syndication. I never saw any need for the movie follow ups or The Carrie Diaries. And I never had any intention of even mentioning And Just Like That… until I learned of one ‘Big’ spoiler. I’m going to get into that in another article, but I think I can now fully articulate just why Sex and the City never appealed to me and why it never should have.
The late French director Francois Truffaut famously said the best way to criticize a movie was to make another movie. I’m not entirely certain whether Ryan Murphy and his incredible team decided to make Pose the absolutely astonishing series that ended this June on FX because he wanted to make a criticism of Sex and The City (though I have a theory he might have which I’ll elaborate on near the end) but having watched the series more and less in its entirety, it’s almost impossible to look at any five minute of that extraordinary show and not see the utter falsity of the world that Carrie Bradshaw and her clan of friends live in.
For those of you who haven’t seen the series yet, Pose takes place in New York from a period spanning the late eighties to the early nineties. It takes place entirely in the world of African-American gay and transgender men and women (was there ever even a black woman on SATC? I honestly don’t care to remember) who fighting a world of endless prejudice, manage to find home and family walking in the ballrooms of New York. Every single lead in the series was African American, most were gay and most of the women were trans. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on the women.
Now even if you’re willing to acknowledge that Reagan-era New York of Pose bore no resemblance that of Giuliani’s New York, let’s be clear: the women of Pose weren’t welcome in the former and none of them would’ve dared showed their faces to anybody in Carrie’s world. I’m pretty sure even Stanford would’ve looked down on them. He might have been willing to admire the flamboyance of Billy Porter’s Pray Tell and the impresarios he represented, but even in his reckless youth (which to be clear was exactly the time Pose was happening) would he have dared show his face in their world. The most he might be willing to do for any of them was wear a red ribbon.
Because let’s be clear of the goblin that was present in the entirety of Seasons 2 and 3 of Pose: AIDS. Did any of the women (or men for that matter) suffer so much as a case of the clap during the run of Sex and the City? I may be remembering wrong the most serious thing I think any of them had to deal with was Miranda’s unplanned pregnancy and don’t pretend she wouldn’t have had better options than any of the women in Pose. One of the great dramatic arcs in the entire series came as Pray Tell found himself suffering from the disease in every sense of the word, not just as it lay waste to him but from the constant, unending stream of funerals going to do week after week after week. He actually lost count. Both he and Blanca (the incredible MJ Rodriguez) had to fight every possible aspect of HIV during the second and third seasons to the point that in the final season the chances of survival for both of them seemed impossible. That Blanca survived over the disease – hell, managed to accomplish a goal that none of the women in SATC would have thought beneath them by simply becoming a nurse – is one of the most quietly powerful things I’ve ever seen on television.
Death was always stalking the characters on Pose. It wasn’t just being gay or black, or trans, it was all of those things. One of the characters Candy was murdered by a john halfway through season 2. Electra (the incomparable Dominique Jackson) worked in a ‘dungeon’ in New York and had a john die on her. Not her fault, but she knew if she was found with it what the consequences were. She assembled her family to handle the problem twice, first to handle the body, then to dispose of it the next season. All of them knew the dangers if they were caught, none of them hesitated. I can’t imagine Charlotte helping Samantha if one of her role plays had just ended with him caught in a leather strap.
And that’s the thing that was far more obvious about the character in The House of Evangelista: they may not have agreed on much, but there was a devotion and love there that went far beyond anything I ever saw the four women on Sex ever go through. Electra may not have agreed with half the choices her ‘daughter’ made when it came to love, but she was always there to support her. One of my favorite moments on the show came when Blanca told her ‘mother’ that she had gotten into nursing school. The love and pure support I saw her give was one of the most emotional things I ever saw this steely character give. It was true and utter affection that I don’t ever remember seeing on Sex.
And Blanca passed it down. Throughout the series she supported her ‘children Angel and Lil Papi a couple that had to deal with issues that the characters on SATC would have done in a joke storyline. Angel (Indya Moore) became addicted to cocaine and heroin at one time, and Lil Papi was for awhile as to. But the two of them supported each other, climbed out of the ditch, and got married. The wedding wasn’t anything like the ones we saw on Sex, far less fancy, much more scaled down – but there was infinitely more love from everybody involved. I believed in their love story a lot more than I believed in any of the ones on Sex.
Now if any Sex fans are still reading this article, no doubt most of them are still saying: “It’s not fair to compare this show and Pose! They’re like apples and oranges!” Remember that theory I said about Murphy making Pose as a counterpoint? In the final minutes of the series, the four key women of the show - Blanca, Angel, Electra and Lulu are all having Cosmos together in a fancy restaurant. They are celebrating their success: Electra has beaten the odds and become a millionaire running an internet sex business and Blanca has finally become a nurse. Angel and Lulu are also doing well. Blanca makes the comment that “We’re just like the women on Sex and the City” - we’ve clearly jumped to at least 1996. Electra, who’s clearly heard of the show, scoffs with her trademark disdain. “What could a bunch of white women know about sex?” (I may be getting the wording wrong, but not the scorn.)
In the sense that I’m white and relatively comfortable, I have more in common with the characters in Sex and the City than anyone in Pose. But I always found the characters on Pose infinitely more interesting, relatable, humane and loving. I’d never have been welcome in the ballrooms, but I’d still rather have gone there than to the fancy restaurants that Sarah Jessica Parker and her friends discussed their ‘problems’. As if a woman who lives in an apartment in Manhattan on the strength of a weekly column had any idea what it was really like to have ‘problems’. Everyone in Pose had so many problems and they managed to get through them and find joy in life, even though everything in the world was turned against them. I have no doubt all of the characters on Sex were ‘costal elites’ and ‘good liberals’ but they could afford to be. They didn’t have to all live in a three room apartment with the paint peeling and no hot water to survive.
I find it unlikely that Pose will ever be followed up: it never enjoyed the loyalist following that a single episode of Sex and the City. But I’d much rather spend a few minutes in their world again – either before or after – than any time in the world Sarah Jessica Parker inhabits. Pose has earned a follow-up. Sex and the City keeps getting them though no one seems to asking for them. And after what I heard happened in the Pilot, I really wonder if anyone will keep watching. In the follow up, I’ll discuss what I know about And Just Like That and the real problem when we keep coming back to the same well over and over.
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