Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the fabulous.
Perhaps what I am getting at are the different ways Pose speaks across generations, to what catches and holds attention. Much as I found the displays of fabulousness interesting, I was captured by the familiarity of institutional walls, waiting rooms, receiving test results, plotting a life or death after receiving test results. I am struck by Blanca’s isolation: attending the clinic on her own, navigating disclosure.
A longstanding interest in the quotidian—the ordinary—now manifests itself as an interest in work that is post- or anti-fabulous. Sarah Schulman worries that younger queer people simply have no experience of AIDS—this differs across race and income and geohistory, but still. She writes, “When the ACT UPers were in their twenties, they were dying.” And notes a generational divide marked by “suffering and trauma for some, and the vague unknowing for others.” Perhaps my premature concern is that a desire for affirmative representation in the register of the fabulous too easily—and readily—overshadows quotidian grottiness. And that in the many celebrations of Pose, the fabulous takes precedence over the barely surviving.
