‘Pose’ Season 2 Is Deeper and Darker Than Ever Thanks to Madonna

Shortly after Pose was renewed for its second season, co-creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy sent a long email chronicling the five things that were essential to Season 2. At the top of that list was a song that became the world’s best-selling single in 1990 and topped the charts for three weeks that summer: Madonna’s “Vogue.”

At first glance a Ryan Murphy show paying tribute to the Queen of Pop hardly seems revolutionary. Glee did that in its first season. However in the world of Pose and the ballroom scene of the ’90s, the conversation around “Vogue” was an optimistic and terrifying one. It was the song that exposed the ballroom scene and the LGBTQ+ community who built these safe spaces to the unyielding gaze of mainstream attention. During a set visit for Season 2 that Decider attended, the creators, cast, and crew explained the genesis of this song-specific season as well as how the joy of Madonna’s hit single was used to echo the pain of a community haunted by the HIV and AIDs epidemic.

The Excitement and Fear of “Vogue”

“I think the season is absolutely an exploration of what happens when a subculture then reaches mainstream culture, without a doubt, and — specifically for our characters — what are the ripple effects of that happening,” co-creator and executive producer Steven Canals said in an interview with a group of reporters that included Decider.

Madonna’s “Vogue” was directly inspired by ballroom dancers and choreographers Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Xtravaganza. As the single becomes one of the biggest songs in the world, Pose‘s dueling families are caught in its complicated crosshairs. This season questions what happens when a secret, safe community becomes the center of public focus. Does it allow for more opportunities for its members and finally give them a seat at the table? Or does it put them under toxic scrutiny?

“It was absolutely part of the fabric of what I initially pitched for the arc of the series. I didn’t know we’d get to it this quickly. But the first season felt like a complete meal, so I think part of the jump (from 1987) to 1990 is that obviously we’re starting a whole new arc,” Canals explained. “It also mirrors what’s happening to ballroom today, right? So on the heels of Pose all of these folks are now aware of ballroom culture.”

“Vogue has become vogue again,” Canals joked.

For co-creator and mega-producer Ryan Murphy, ballroom and vogue’s rise of popularity in the ’90s isn’t just about a specific part of LGBTQ+ culture coming into focus. It’s about the particular brand of attention Madonna brought to the scene. “This scene, which was popularized by the most popular woman in the world — Madonna — and there was a sense for many many months that people are going to finally understand,” Murphy said. The complex push and pull of art going mainstream is something the LGBTQ+ community has dealt with for decades. Murphy likened the rise of vogue dance to the popularity of disco in the ’70s and Village People’s 1978 hit “YMCA.” Despite the hope they inspired for LGBTQ+ communities, neither became a boundary-destroying gateway to mainstream acceptance. A few short years after the rise of disco, records were being burned in baseball stadiums.

“Every generation has that moment, that inflection moment where you think you’re in but then you’re not in,” Murphy explained. “So the question we’re asking this season is what happens when you think you’re in and what happens when it goes away? It is a very interesting place to take this show.”

How Pose Went Full Madonna

Before Season 2 was even renewed, Murphy and Canals knew they wanted to focus on Madonna’s release of “Vogue.” They just had to get the queen herself on board. “I had to get Madonna’s permission to use that song and her and all of that stuff. She’s a friend, and her manager Guy Oseary is a friend. So it didn’t take that long, but it took a while,” Murphy explained.

As Murphy has mentioned before, artists have been exceptionally kind when it comes to clearing music for Pose. The creator doesn’t think that generosity has to do with his past work on Glee or his reputation for using music responsibly. Rather, it’s because he thinks people believe in Pose‘s story.

“Not everyone we went to on Glee said yes. This show everyone said yes, and I think that they said yes because they saw the show,” Murphy said. “Madonna was a very quick yes because she believed in the themes of the show and particularly the actors, you know? It really wasn’t about me. It was about them and what the show was trying to say.”

But just as important as securing Madonna’s work, Pose had to ensure it continued to portray the ballroom community in an authentic way. That meant paying special attention to specific elements of hair and makeup. For example, clothing for background ballroom actors primarily comes from thrift shops, and few pieces cost more than $25 to reflect how. This was all done in an effort to show how poor many members of this disenfranchised community were and to accurately capture what a ball during this time looked like.

Likewise Pose employs both runway choreographer Twiggy Pucci Garçon and vogue choreographer Leiomy Maldonado for its ballroom scenes. Both Garçon and Maldonado came up through the ballroom scene and both see these communities as essential to who they are today.

“Without voguing I probably wouldn’t be alive right now, honestly,” Maldonado revealed. Known as the “Wonder Woman of Vogue,” Maldonado was discovered on America’s Best Dance Crew and has since worked with artists like Willow Smith, Icona Pop, and Rhianna. Pose utilizes a very deliberate and period appropriate style of late ’80s and early ’90s voguing. “For my personally I took voguing very serious because when I watched it I just felt the emotion. I felt the emotion behind each dancer.”

This attention to detail and passion for authenticity comes down to Murphy’s belief in Pose as a series. “I did not want to do this as a niche show,” Murphy explained. “I demanded that this show have the budget, the same budget as OJ. I demanded that it have the same marketing budget and the same promotional budget. I didn’t want it to be a little get-out-of-jail-free card. I wanted it to have the respect of a corporation. And I wanted to use whatever power I had to push it through in a mainstream way.”

The Ripple Effects of “Vogue”

Though the creators of Pose wouldn’t give away specific plot points, they did tease how the rise of “Vogue” changes Pose‘s world of gorgeous characters. “Some of them are like, ‘Honey, I’m ready for my moment. Where is the audition? I’m ready to become a supermodel,'” co-executive producer, writer, and director Janet Mock explained. “Others are like ‘No we need to close these doors. We need to barricade it because what’s going to happen is they’re going to eat us up, take what’s ours, and leave us in the dust. We’ll be left here again.’ Others are like ‘Oh I can do greater things for my children,’ which is what Blanca’s (MJ Rodriguez) approach is.”

According to Mock, Blanca, the loving mother of the House of Evangelista, takes an optimistic approach to the new attention being paid to the ballroom scene. She sees it as a way to make her daughter Angel (Indya Moore) into a model and her son Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain) into a professional dancer.

“Making a way out of no way is the only way we know how. So this season you see that even more with these characters and I think that that’s very exciting,” Mock said. “You fell in love with them in Season 1. And now in Season 2 you have to know the consequences of loving someone and sometimes losing them.”

The Sorrow Hiding Beneath the Spotlight

As much as this season is about the joy of Madonna, it’s also heavily about loss. The early ’90s saw the greatest death toll from the HIV and AIDs epidemic. Even when this disease was at its worst the government still refused to do anything to help victims, and religiously fueled homophobia led to this community being further ostracized. Season 1 of Pose ended with both Blanca and this series’ pitch-perfect emcee Pray Tell (Billy Porter) with a positive HIV diagnosis. As the rise “Vogue” shines a light on this ignored and abused community, its members are screaming for help.

“In my lifetime I saw the trans community go mainstream, and that was something that really surprised me. It surprised me how complicated it was,” supervising producer Our Lady J said. “Going back to the work on Pose, it’s my mission to create as much empathy around characters living with HIV so that we can lean into our humanity around disease. I really think that’s the end of this epidemic.”

Series stars MJ Rodriguez and Billy Porter also spoke to the importance of frankly portraying the HIV and AIDs epidemic. “I think our stories are finally getting to be told not like they’ve been told before. I think people are finally taking us serious and not putting this stigma over our heads,” Rodriquez said. “At that time in 1990, there were more deaths than any other. So I think we’ll be showing a bit more of that.”

Porter focused more on the celebrity catalyst behind this season’s shifting focus. “I think we have to honor the idea or the truth that Madonna has always been an LGBTQ+ ally in ways that not many were doing before she came along, and she was a leader in that front,” Porter said. “I have to say as we’ve lived longer in life in the world in general we realize that no one is actually perfect. So while there are things about appropriation that are problematic for me, it can’t go unsaid that she was totally present for us through the darkest of times. So I think it’s a really important story to tell because it did some great shit for us.”

The series other two leads, Indya Moore and Dominique Jackson, also weighed in about how by reflecting on ballroom’s past, Pose is helping its community’s future. “A lot of trans women of color are sex workers, so I think it’s important for sex workers to have representation because that’s missing,” Moore noted. Moore portrays Angel, the ethereal member of the House of Evangelista who is known for her beauty and compassion and who spends most of Season 1 as a sex worker.

“I think the way the show holds families and parents accountable for the way they ostracize their children for being queer and trans and like leave them out to be vulnerable to society. And I think this gives a beautiful and clear and real outlook as to what happens to your kids and what can happen to your kids when you kick them out of your home and leave them with nothing,” Moore said. “Trans and queer people deserve the same access to love and resources and the encouragement that we can achieve our dreams.”

Jackson portrays the savage queen of the ballroom scene Elektra. The actress acknowledged that it is a challenge to be one of the few sources of trans representation of television. “It is a lot of pressure but the juxtaposition of that is seeing that one of my sister’s is murdered or beaten or another trans man killed. So with us being this visible now, people are starting to see,” Jackson said.

Though the real-life Jackson is far kinder than Elektra and her devastating reads, she’s just as prominent in the ballroom community as her fictional counterpart. “I was deemed iconic in February of 2016, and the ballroom community is part of me. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I learned to survive,” Jackson said. “The show actually lets us know that, look, we started going mainstream way back. So let’s realize that’s where we have been. That’s what we’re going. And let’s continue to move forward.”

New episodes of Pose premiere on FX Tuesdays at 10/9c.

Where to stream Pose