I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  At fifteen, Murphy had his first love affair, with a man in his twenties. He was a celebrity to Murphy, having starred in a high school production of Oklahoma! “He had a burgundy Corvette, and he was a lifeguard, and he would pick me up, and, for our dates, we’d have Chinese food, and we’d go wash the car at the you-wash-it-yourself thing,” Murphy said. “And we’d drive around, listening to Christopher Cross singing ‘Sailing.’ It was the height of glamour.” That summer, when Murphy was at choir camp, his mother found a cache of love letters. She asked Murphy’s boyfriend over for a Coke, and, as Murphy put it, “was like, ‘No, no, no.’ ” Terrified, the boyfriend cut off contact. Murphy was grounded, and the family began group therapy. (Last year, Murphy looked up his old boyfriend: “I said, ‘I think about you all the time. Do you remember me?’ And he was like, ‘Are you kidding? I see you on TV all the time. You were so sweet.’ ”)

  Although Murphy raged for years about his parents’ response, he now has sympathy for their reaction: “I would do the same thing, no matter what the sexual orientation of my child. A fifteen-year-old boy dating somebody who was older? I didn’t really understand it until I had kids.” His heartbreak also led to something positive. To Murphy’s surprise, the therapist listened to him and took his side: “He told my parents that I was precocious and that I was smarter than they were, and that if they didn’t leave me alone, I’d end up leaving town and never talking to them again.”

  Murphy turned his upbringing into an origin myth, as we all do—and, as only some do, into art. On Glee, he gave his story a happy ending: In one plotline, a working-class dad learns to love his Broadway-obsessed gay son. On Pose, there’s a less happy version of the conflict: A teenage boy, a talented dancer, gets beaten by his father with a belt, and their break seems irreparable. In real life, when Murphy’s father died, in 2011 at the age of seventy-three, the two were still largely estranged, but Murphy made sure that he got excellent medical care. On his deathbed, his father sent Murphy a letter of apology. Murphy could read only half of it before stuffing it in a kitchen drawer.

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  In New York, in November, Pose was in full gear. On a windy Brooklyn pier, as “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But the Rent” boomed, Murphy filmed dancers voguing in acid-washed jackets and Kangol hats. “Yasss!” he yelled. “Use your space!” Murphy loves the cold. He was wearing a faux-fur parka and cargo pants with thigh panels made of purple plastic.

  Near some footage monitors, Steven Canals, the show’s co-creator, showed me an article that he’d been reading on Paste: “Paris Is Still Burning: What if We Loved Black Queers as Much as We Love/Steal from Black Queer Culture?” Canals grew up in the Bronx and spent a decade as a college administrator before going to film school. His partner, the artist Hans Kuzmich, is trans. “Sometimes I can be a little militant, as a queer person of color,” Canals told me, about the writers’ room. “I don’t have the luxury to take those identities off.” He was exhausted after plotting out scripts with a team of four: the African American trans author and activist Janet Mock; the Transparent writer Our Lady J, who is white and trans; Murphy; and Falchuk, who is white and straight. When Canals first met Murphy, he raised concerns: Would Murphy treat the characters in Pose as full people, not jokes or freaks? Murphy got it, Canals said: “I knew that I was not going to be just a brown body in the room.”

  Murphy approached.

  “Hello, Mutha,” Canals said.

  “Hello, child,” Murphy said.

  Murphy is “the mother of the House of Murphy,” Canals joked. “He’s super-regal, but he doesn’t have a bougie attitude. It’s grounded fabulosity.”

  In the pilot script, Blanca, an idealistic member of the fictional House of Abundance, is sick of having her ideas stolen by her house mother, the imperious Elektra, and starts a rival house. Since I’d read it, however, some changes had been made: Trump was out, replaced by a cokehead Trump Organization executive played by James Van Der Beek. “Nobody wants to see that fuckhead,” Murphy said of Trump, swatting his hand as if brushing off a fly.

  Even without a role in the show, Trump was inescapable. He had tweeted out a ban on trans people serving in the military; reports soon emerged that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had barred employees from using the word “transgender” in official documents. Murphy knew that Pose would receive political scrutiny—a precondition for any series about such a vulnerable community. Paris Is Burning was criticized for exploiting its subjects; Jill Soloway, the creator of Transparent, was under fire for casting Jeffrey Tambor in a trans role; even the beloved RuPaul soon sparked pushback for suggesting he might not allow trans women on RuPaul’s Drag Race. “You can’t underestimate the power of social media to shame a business,” Murphy said.

  He generally considers this a good thing: Phenomena like Black Twitter have goaded TV into being smarter about race and power. Some of his other shows had been criticized as insensitive, including Coven, a voodoo-drenched season of American Horror Story set in New Orleans. Murphy was determined that Pose be above reproach: authentic, inclusive, nonexploitative. The show, he bragged, had 108 trans cast or crew members, and 31 LGBTQ characters. It employed trans directors, too, including Silas Howard, from Transparent. Murphy was giving his profits to pro-trans causes. On a promotional panel, Murphy put Canals, Mock, and the actresses in the front row, not Van Der Beek. “It’s television as advocacy,” Murphy said. “I want to put my money where my mouth is.”

  Meanwhile, conflict was emanating from an unexpected angle. Jennie Livingston, the director of Paris Is Burning, felt excluded from the process. It was a messy situation, likely inflected by Murphy’s concerns about the optics of being associated with another white creator. After much wrangling, Murphy gave her a paid consulting-producer credit and the opportunity to direct if the show was renewed. But maybe a flare-up of this sort was to be expected. Debates about who owned what had always been central to the ballroom scene. The performers strove for “realness,” doing flawless imitations of Vogue covers and Dynasty divas, in costumes often procured by shoplifting. (The pilot of Pose features a hilarious dramatization of a legendary heist of Danish royal finery from a New York museum.) The dancers’ moves were, in turn, stolen—or celebrated, depending on one’s perspective—by the mainstream world, with Madonna, the empress of appropriation, transforming the subculture into a lucrative trend. In the Pose pilot, Elektra delivers a speech that serves as a sly defense of this kind of magpie creativity: “Just because you have an idea does not mean you know how to properly execute it! Ideas are ingredients. Only a real mother knows how to prepare them.”

  The casting sessions for Pose had unsettled Murphy: Many of the trans actors lacked health insurance and bank accounts; nearly all had stories about sexual violence. But he didn’t want to make the show too gritty or downbeat. Charmed by the “butterfly” loveliness of his cast, he was interested in “leaning in to romance instead of degradation”—and making something hopeful and “aspirational.” Pose, he theorized, might even be family-friendly, something that was a little hard to imagine about a series that included scenes at the Times Square sex emporium Show World.

  Often, talking about Pose led Murphy into reveries about Glee, another show that had been designed to give queer kids characters they could root for. “Against all odds, the quote-unquote ‘fag musical’ became a billion-dollar brand,” Murphy recalled. More than once, he asked me if he should revive Glee. “The power of it, the power of being able to show youth and joy,” he mused. “I would much prefer to live in worlds like that.”

  In midtown, I’d seen an audition of a modern ballroom “Icon,” Dominique Jackson, who read for Elektra. In the scene, Elektra has her nails done by her rebel “child,” Blanca, whose political activism she finds absurd. “You’re a regular transvestite Norma Rae,” Jackson sneered, her cheekbones sharp as knives.

  Jac
kson, a trans model who appeared on the reality show Strut, was born in Tobago and left home in 1990, at the age of fifteen. When she went through her gender transition, her mother, who is religious, “took a step back,” she told Murphy and his team, softly adding, “Right now, I have to love her from a distance.” Jackson’s ballroom elders ended up raising her, back when she was a homeless immigrant doing sex work. Jackson, in turn, had mothered more than thirty “children.” She spoke fondly of elders from the scene before hip-hop’s ascendance, elegant queens who lived in cockroach-infested apartments but put on full contour makeup for a trip to the grocery store: “It was really like a Caribbean family—they never let you know the real thing of what was happening.”

  “You’re so amazing, and a star,” Murphy said. Elektra, he told her, was his favorite role—the one he acted out in the writers’ room.

  Before Jackson left, she thanked Murphy for American Horror Story: Coven, particularly for a scene in which a witch named Myrtle cries out “Balenciaga!” during her death throes. Falchuk and Minear had written a lot of the show, Murphy told her, but that moment was all him. “I knew that people would love it,” he told her. “Because that’s what I would say if I was burned at the stake.”

  Murphy’s first celebrities were nuns. Every year, his family invited one to tag along, in their green Pinto, on their vacation to St. Petersburg, Florida. When night fell, Murphy would interview the “nun du jour”: “Have you ever kissed a boy?”; “Do you think you’ll go to hell?” He was captivated by their fashion. In the wake of Vatican II, some experimented with a half-cap or a shorter skirt, but others still wore a full habit.

  The wannabe pope steeped himself in Catholic rituals, gazing at the stained-glass windows of St. Simon the Apostle Church in Indianapolis, marveling at stories of saints eating lice or scabs. “Then I read that the pope had the cleanest, purest heart in the world, so I would practice,” he said. “And I would wake up and say, ‘How long can I go without committing any sin whatsoever?’ And I would last, like, three hours. I couldn’t wait to say something bitchy or eat something I wasn’t supposed to, or have impure thoughts about boys. So I quickly abandoned that.”

  Instead, he pursued journalism, a field that welcomes all these impulses. He had been accepted by a film school in California, but his parents’ income was too high for him to receive financial aid, and although his mother and father gave his brother, Darren, tuition money, they told Ryan that he was strong enough to make it on his own. He obtained a journalism degree at Indiana University while working three jobs, including selling shoes at a mall, and aggressively pursuing newspaper internships. On his first day as a crime reporter in Tennessee, he made the disastrous decision to wear a white suit, Tom Wolfe–style, to a murder scene. At The Miami Herald, he insinuated himself into the Styles department and wrote a profile of Meryl Streep, insisting that the newspaper pay for the rights to an Annie Leibovitz photograph. (The other interns hated him.) At The Washington Post, his colleagues’ reaction was equally poor when he rejected what he considered dull assignments, saying, “No. I want Bob Woodward to be my mentor!” Nevertheless, he relished the opportunity to be near Stephanie Mansfield, a poison-pen profiler who’d “sweep in, all ambition, smelling feminine and amazing.”

  There were missed opportunities, here and there, for the glamorous life. During college, he flew to New York to interview for a Rolling Stone internship. Chain-smoking Kools, he wore a lavender WilliWear tank top, and was so emaciated that, as he puts it, he “looked Biafran.” He got the job, but it was unpaid, so Murphy couldn’t take it. He spent the night with a wealthy acquaintance, whose boyfriend caught Murphy in their bed: There was drama, and a declaration of love. Murphy still wonders if he should have taken the opportunity to be a kept man—the express lane to the “white penthouse apartment” he longed for.

  Instead, he landed in L.A., becoming a prolific, witty freelancer for newspapers and magazines, including Entertainment Weekly. In 1990, he wrote for The Miami Herald a complex profile of a tetchy Jessica Lange, calling her “tungsten beneath silk.” He interviewed Cher so many times that she grew concerned. At the time, he was living with Bill Condon, a filmmaker who, two years after they broke up, won a best-screenplay Oscar for the movie Gods and Monsters. Murphy felt like a stifled househusband, submerging his ambition in garden design and dinner parties. As an escape plan, in 1995, he wrote a romantic comedy, Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn? He sold the screenplay to Steven Spielberg. Many major actresses read for the lead.

  In their garden, Murphy recalled, “I designed this outdoor cage where we had these lovebirds.” He went on, “And I came home, and Bill was in the backyard, and I looked in the cage. And these lovebirds were called Auguste and Harlow, and Harlow was gone, and I was like, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘I went to clean the cage, and she flew away.’ And I was like, That’s my sign. And I turned around, and I got in my car, and I drove to the Chateau Marmont, and I checked in and I lived there for six months—until my business person said, ‘You’ve spent every dime and you have to leave.’ So that was the beginning of my Hollywood career.” Condon remembers the end point differently: While visiting Laguna Beach with Murphy, Condon got caught in a riptide—and when he thought he saw a flash of hesitation on Murphy’s face, as if he might let him drown, he knew that the relationship was over.

  Spielberg never made the movie, but Murphy was undaunted. “He exuded this air of certainty that I had never really witnessed in Hollywood before,” his friend Bart Brown said. “Not arrogance—confidence. But he had no poker face. He couldn’t disguise himself. Right away, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

  In early December, at the Connelly Theater on East Fourth Street, Murphy filmed the ballroom competitions, some of which had made-up themes, such as “Weather Girl.” A panel of judges sat on the rickety stage, among them various Legends from Paris Is Burning and a dancer from the “Vogue” video. They held up signs: “10,” “10,” “10.” It was a joyful, anarchic atmosphere: Even the writers kept breaking out in dance competitions. Dominique Jackson was all glammed up, smiling, in a poofy yellow hat: She’d won the role of Elektra. While she was doing a big monologue, Murphy threw her a new line that got laughs: “My first rule as queen will be to bring back the guillotine!”

  One afternoon, Murphy, who was wearing a “Sade” baseball hat, insisted on playing nothing but Sade, even when Canals and Mock begged for Destiny’s Child. While he was in the ballroom giving the actors notes, the Times posted its latest exposé of Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse of women; it focused on the “complicity machine” enabling him, including agents at CAA. When Canals, sitting near a bank of monitors, read the name of Bryan Lourd, one of Murphy’s agents, he gasped and held up his phone to show Murphy’s assistant. Lourd had declined to comment to the Times on whether he had known of Weinstein’s alleged abuse of women, citing client confidentiality.

  Murphy sat down and read the article. When I asked him for his reaction, he said, simply, “I’m loyal to my friends,” then added that he didn’t believe that any of his agents would facilitate abuse. Lourd was the father of one of Murphy’s stars, Billie Lourd; Gwyneth Paltrow, one of Weinstein’s accusers, was a close friend of Murphy’s, and was engaged to Brad Falchuk. Murphy had finally made it to Hollywood’s core; now lava was pouring out.

  None of the #MeToo revelations were truly shocking, Murphy told me, if you knew your history. It was the dank underside of the “razzle-dazzle”—systemic abuse that had been romanticized as “the casting couch.” Murphy had his own #MeToo stories. When he was young, an older boy had molested him; as an adult, he’d been hit by an ex-boyfriend. We spoke about the scandal-sheet stories that had shadowed the young cast of Glee: suicide, a heroin overdose, charges for domestic battery and for possessing child pornography. He expressed regret for the intensity of the environment, but no surprise. “It’s sad, but it’s also Hollywood,” he said. �
�Nobody comes here because they’re healthy. Nobody, nobody I know, was parented well who is a successful Hollywood person. Or who’s willing to endure that. You’re just trying to fill up some huge hole.”

  Personal loyalties aside, he was grimly satisfied by the changes in the air—even, at times, exhilarated. He was certainly not sorry to see the straight-male leaders of his industry falling down: the bad-boy director James Toback; the slob-comic Louis C.K., Murphy’s fellow-auteur at FX, whom he found unfriendly. “The whole point is to bring the next group of people,” he said. “Kick all the old white fucks out and bring in the new people.”

  All the people on the Pose set had projects in their pockets. Silas Howard, the director, told me about a great idea for a punk-rock road-trip movie set in the nineties. Janet Mock had a pitch for “a trans Felicity.” Everyone wanted to get heard and get funded.

  During a pause in filming, Murphy and Mock talked about Murphy’s desire for Pose to be aspirational. What could that word mean for characters who had often led painful lives?

  Murphy said, “We’ve shot a lot of scenes that are emotionally very dark—”

  Mock broke in, “But you do want to see Blanca have a moment of happiness and glamour and have her posing and be victorious.”

  Murphy turned to me. “Janet and I were talking earlier,” he said. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think we should kill people on the show—I love them too much.’ And she was like, ‘You almost have a responsibility to crush your audience. To say, “You love them? Well, look what’s happened when you don’t get involved.” ’ ”

  Murphy had told me that he likes his writers’ rooms to be pragmatic, not self-indulgent or therapeutic. But the Pose room was host to raw confessions about surgical transitions and “survival sex”—“deep, third-level” conversations, as Canals put it, that helped them create story lines. Murphy’s recollection of his father smacking him for shoplifting a red shoe ended up in the third episode. The challenge was to make those experiences fit in the context of the eighties, among characters who likely had a different social-justice framework than that of their creators, and who might identify as drag queens or female impersonators, and not as trans. And, as with any story designed to send a message, there was a risk of crossing the line between uplifting and didactic.