POSE.

• Author: Shackford, Scott
• Position: TELEVISION - Television program review - Brief article

Set amid the New York Drag Ball culture of the late 1980s, Pose, from FX, provides historical perspective to our current cultural interest in the lives of people who don't conform to typical gender norms.

Television producer Ryan Murphy populated the show with transgender performers--both in front of the camera and behind the scenes as writers. The first eight-episode season tells a fictionalized story of the foundation of a "house" of young transgender women and gay men attempting to compete and win balls, a scene popularized by the 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning.

The show is a family drama, albeit one where the "family" is a group of people who...