What to Watch on Netflix: Pose Seasons 1-2 and Disclosure

FX’s Pose and the documentary Disclosure center trans voices and are available on Netflix this week if you’re looking to diversify your watch list

This week’s What to Watch on Netflix post aims to center trans voices with Pose and Disclosure, and maybe encourage some of you to diversify your watch lists.

While Pride events all over the world have been canceled due to the global pandemic, COVID-19 has not stopped protestors from organizing due to the recent deaths of Black citizens such as Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd at the hands of police officers. And unfortunately, that is only a few of the victims of police brutality in past weeks.

On June 14, All Black Lives Matter held a march in Los Angeles meant to protest police brutality and explicitly include LGBTQ+ voices in the conversation and fight for Black lives. So when we say, “Black lives matter,” we mean all Black lives.

Besides protesting, another means of grappling with unconscious bias–or learning more about a community that we may or may not be apart of ourselves–is diversifying the stories that we tune into and the history that we learn about.

It goes without saying that often the history we are told is from the perspective of the dominant culture. Those who are not white, or are not cis, or are not straight, or are not men tend to be erased and that erasure worsens the further you are from those accepted identities. The way to counteract that erasure is to listen to marginalized voices, to invest in their stories, and amplify them.

This week we encourage you to listen to, invest in, and amplify the voices of trans storytellers by tuning into FX’s Pose and the documentary, Disclosure.

Pose

Spanning the late 80s and the early 90s, Pose is FX’s groundbreaking series that centers Black and Latinx members of the LGBTQ+ community participating in ball culture in New York City. The series has the largest cast of trans actors on television and is a vehicle for storytelling from voices often unheard and unseen by the mainstream.

While Pose consists of an ensemble cast, the primary focus is on the House of Evangelista, their rise in ballroom, and clashes with other houses in the culture they all have found a place in. Led by their mother Blanca, the House of Evangelista starts the story as underdogs but begins to cement their place category by category.

Pose is not a series that shies away from the harsh realities of living in an America that discounts and disregards one of its most vulnerable populations. The show traces the history of ball culture, the rise of yuppies, the AIDS pandemic, and the steady stream of LGBTQ+ youth finding their way to the city after being put out by their parents.

For those without a home, without a family, ballroom is where you can be embraced for who you are. It is pageantry, fashion, glam, and all that glitters beneath the lights but it’s also about being seen as real and important, as someone loved.

Pose seasons 1 and 2 are available to stream now