Steven Canals says idea for Pose began at Binghamton

“And the category is ... live, work, pose!”

This is the start of a ball — an underground LGBTQ+ subculture where participants walk the runway, vogue, dance, throw shade. Judges decide who has the best costume, the most attitude, who is the most real. But balls are more than a chance at a trophy. They are also about community — a safety net for trans people who have been rejected by their families and by society.

It’s a world Steven Canals ’05, MA ’08, didn’t know about until his junior year at Binghamton. It’s a world that taught him to be comfortable with his own identity as a queer person of color, and it’s a world he now brings to life with Pose, the Golden Globe-nominated and Emmy-winning show that recently completed its second season on FX.

Canals is the show’s co-creator, co-executive producer and writer, but growing up in the Bronx during the crack and HIV/AIDS epidemics of the late 1980s, it took a while for him to realize a career in television was even possible. As Canals puts it, “We were just trying to survive.”

Cartoons like Transformers and The Smurfs, and shows like The Cosby Show and Cheers were a welcome distraction from the world outside his living room window. He liked the way television made him feel, so when he joined an after-school program as a high-school sophomore, he chose the film track. He worked alongside eight classmates to produce a documentary on turf violence and toward the end of the project, one of those classmates was shot and killed. Canals was suddenly living the very experience his group sought to highlight in their documentary.

“That completely reframed the importance of film and television for me,” he says. “It was the first time I really understood the intersection of entertainment and education that film could provide. I knew then that I was going to commit my life to storytelling. And hopefully through my work highlight the experiences of people who often are overlooked and don’t have a platform to share their stories and their voices.”

That journey began at Binghamton University. Canals says his college search was for the best of the best, and at the time he was applying, Binghamton was No. 1 in the SUNY system. It was here where Canals first got the idea for Pose, after a professor suggested he watch Paris Is Burning. The 1990 documentary chronicles the ball subculture in New York City during the ’80s, and it was the first time he’d seen actors on the screen who looked and sounded like him. He thought it would make a great television show.

The idea resurfaced a decade later while Canals was completing his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he decided to write a pilot. The script, about a young kid who moves to New York and gets entangled in a ballroom war between two house mothers, won a screenwriting contest at the school and earned Canals some meetings with studio executives. But it was there the process came to a standstill. Each executive he met with told Canals the idea was too niche — it was too brown, too black and too queer.

“The subtext of being told by an industry that is dominated by cisgendered, straight white men that Pose has no value is that I have no value,” says Canals. “It’s tough to be told no when you’ve crafted a narrative where you’ve put so much of yourself in it. It feels like a personal rejection.”

But he refused to give up.

“I don’t know that I, as a person of color, have the luxury to quit,” he says. “I come from a people with bleeding soles from walking thousands of miles in threadbare shoes. You persist. You keep fighting. There was never a point where I was going to give up — I just thought, ‘OK, you’re not the right collaborator.’ But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t absolutely exhausted.”

It was then that Ryan Murphy, known for Nip/ Tuck, Glee and American Horror Story, asked to meet with Canals. Murphy had optioned the ​rights to Paris Is Burning, heard about Canals’ script and wanted to merge the concepts.

The result is a look into LGBTQ+ history — the house and ball culture set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in New York City during the 1980s. The show set a record for the highest number of transgender performers (five) in series-regular roles in television history, and is one of only two shows currently on television that centers around the trans community. (The other show, Transparent, which focuses on the trans experience from a white family’s perspective, is ending after this season.) Those numbers are even more important when you consider the current life expectancy for a trans woman of color is 35 years, according to GLAAD, an organization devoted to countering discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in the media. Pose shows this group not just surviving but thriving.

Since it premiered in June 2018, the show has gone on to earn Emmy, Golden Globe, Critics Choice and Writers Guild of America nominations, as well as an AFI Award for TV Program of the Year, and a Peabody Award, which honors powerful and enlightening stories in the media. In September 2019, Pose was nominated for six Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series. One of its stars, Billy Porter, won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. The success of Pose means a lot, considering Canals and his team weren’t even sure if viewers would show up at all that first season.

“There was a lot of discussion around the choices we made in season one,” he says. “Is this going to scare the audience off or are they going to be invested in the narrative? But in writing the second season, we didn’t have to have those conversations. We were able to craft the story unencumbered because we knew the audience was already invested in these characters. Now we can just tell the story. That’s very freeing.”

Season two, which began on FX in June, focuses on two major storylines. The first is the emergence of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an advocacy group formed in New York in the late 1980s that fought for legislation, access to medical care and medical research for the AIDS epidemic. The second is Madonna’s 1990 song “Vogue,” which places the subculture of ballroom into the limelight. The season explores not only the excitement, but the complications of this community suddenly being thrust into the mainstream.

Canals hopes storylines like these showcase the beauty and breadth of the queer and trans experience. But he also hopes those watching, no matter their gender or sexual identity, recognize that people are more alike than different.

“Everyone wants the same thing,” Canals says. “We want to be accepted, we want to be loved, we just want to be affirmed for who we are.”

For Canals, Pose is more than a TV show — it’s a form of advocacy. He understands the importance of seeing oneself reflected back on television, admitting he would’ve spent fewer years living in the closet had he seen positive representation of queer people growing up. Which is why his journey to this point was never about simply having a career or making money.

“I wanted my work to be more than just entertainment,” Canals says. “I wanted to change the television landscape, so we see new narratives being told. I hope the show’s success will open the door for more content creators, specifically LGBTQ+, people of color and women creators to come forward and tell their stories.”

Canals, named a writer to watch in 2018 by Variety, has a few ideas about what he wants to do next. Those ideas are still in the early stages, but his accomplishments in the industry mean someday they will no longer be just in his head.

“I’m so excited to have a career as a professional writer in Hollywood and know that I have the ability to tell these stories. This career is such a crapshoot, and you really don’t know if you’re going to make it or not. So, it’s mindblowing and a very surreal experience to be at a place in my life and my career where I’ve actually made that goal happen.”