It would be easy to play Pray as an angry, disillusioned, or even oblivious person. Yet Porter’s portrayal is warm, dignified, and uncertain. He expresses an understated yearning for things to be different — an idealistic belief that all that is good and wonderful about ballroom can somehow transfer into real life. Pray wants us to strive. He wants us to thrive. Even in his bleakest moments, faced with his own mortality, he reaches inside and finds strength and courage to continue. He reminds us that things can be, and will be, different. He gives us hope. He stands up for his right as a human being to give and receive love from whomever he wants, even if it’s the hot young guy your friends disapprove of. That’s okay too!
Sometimes I forget that I live in a bit of a bubble. My nieces and nephews have three sets of lesbian aunts, and they accept us without pause or thought — not because they’ve been told to, but because they know us. Their lives seem a long way away from the time and place of Pose, where the seeds of LGBTQ+ social acceptance are juxtaposed against the dangers that haunt its characters at every corner. If you live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York, it’s easy to believe that things are better everywhere now, that queer people no longer face the sorts of perils the characters of Pose did decades before. It’s easy to think we have come a long way, because in many places and many ways, we have.
But it’s important to remember how often this is not the case. In many places across the country, things still aren’t that far off from how they were during the era of Pose. Bullying, employment discrimination, and violence still rule the lives of many LGBTQ+ Americans. On Pose, we come face to face with people like Blanca, who must contend with having her nail salon burned down, or Pray, who turns his back on love because he doesn’t feel worthy. These aren’t just stories on a screen — they’re a painful reminder of just how hard life once was for our community, and a more painful wake up call about how little things have changed for some of us.
That’s what makes Pose larger than life. Its characters’ struggle is made all the more real by the fact that these stories contain more than a few shades of truth. It’s the courage and humanity these narratives and actors reflect that makes this show so worthy of applause. An Outstanding Drama Series win for Pose and a Lead Actor in a Drama Series win for Porter would affirm the power of queer storytelling like this, which presents our demons and our triumphs with beauty, grace, and authenticity.
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