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Oct. 7th, 2019 10:15 amSo I don't know if any of you watched Pose - if not, I think it's still on BBC iPlayer. It's from the guy who did Glee, but don't hold that against it; it's written and performed by the biggest collection of trans and gender-non-conforming people of colour, and it's wonderful and real and heartbreaking and Dawson from Dawson's Creek plays a horrible 80s-Trump type character and gets punched in the face.
I can't have a favourite character - too many people's stories and selves and lives reached out and grabbed me by the heart. But MJ Rodriguez as Blanca made me cry more often than anyone else (though Billy Porter as Pray Tell - for which he rightfully took an Emmy and a Golden Globe - came a close second).
When we first meet Blanca, it's a Cinderella story; she's very much exploited in the shadow of someone else's house.
And now I find that she's been cast as Audrey in a production of Little Shop of Horrors (opposite Guillermo from the What We Do In The Shadows TV series, no less) and my heart can't contain how much this role needed to be sung by a black trans woman.
At first I thought, maybe, is that too on-the-nose? "you don't need no make-up / no need to pretend" "learn how to be more / the girl that's inside you"? But Galaxy Brain says: Audrey was ALWAYS trans. I think I might even have had that headcanon about Ellen Greene's performance when I was a teenager? And maybe this representation isn't even that bad for its time, given how it predates RENT where the audience identification character *misgenders Angel at her funeral*...
I can't have a favourite character - too many people's stories and selves and lives reached out and grabbed me by the heart. But MJ Rodriguez as Blanca made me cry more often than anyone else (though Billy Porter as Pray Tell - for which he rightfully took an Emmy and a Golden Globe - came a close second).
When we first meet Blanca, it's a Cinderella story; she's very much exploited in the shadow of someone else's house.
And now I find that she's been cast as Audrey in a production of Little Shop of Horrors (opposite Guillermo from the What We Do In The Shadows TV series, no less) and my heart can't contain how much this role needed to be sung by a black trans woman.
At first I thought, maybe, is that too on-the-nose? "you don't need no make-up / no need to pretend" "learn how to be more / the girl that's inside you"? But Galaxy Brain says: Audrey was ALWAYS trans. I think I might even have had that headcanon about Ellen Greene's performance when I was a teenager? And maybe this representation isn't even that bad for its time, given how it predates RENT where the audience identification character *misgenders Angel at her funeral*...