POSE

I just started bingeing the first season of POSE on Netflix and despite some pretty bad acting by some in the cast, and some too-on-the-nose plot devices, the terrific performances by MJ Rodriguez as Blanca, Indya Moore as Angel, and especially Billy Porter as Pray Tell, have kept me watching.

And then tonight I watched episode six and now I'm totally hooked. The scene in the AIDS hospital ward where Porter and then Rodriguez and then the two of them sing for the dying AIDS patients just broke me down. Maybe you had to be there, but it evoked the tragic realities of that time too intensely for me not to fall apart.

I had a lot of friends die in the '80s and '90s from AIDS, some ex-lovers included, but I was a coward (and stuck in LA while most of them were in NYC) when it came to visiting people in hospitals ever since I watched my mother die in one in 1966.

I did fly back to visit one of my dearest friends, poet Tim Dlugos, in the AIDS ward of Roosevelt Hospital (see his poem "G9") but after a while he dismissed me knowing how anxious hospitals made me then (before I ended up spending so much time in them for my own maladies, none AIDS related). And that's what overwhelmed me watching that scene.

I noted that that episode also happened to be directed by Janet Mock and co-written by her as well. One of my heroes. I only wish Tim was still around so I could tell him how I got a crush on her and he could make fun of me in ways only he could. Damn that episode was some powerful storytelling.