/lit/ - Literature

>>20801494
>Television requires us to welcome characters into our homes on a daily or weekly basis, increasing tolerance, understanding and empathy. I’ve seen this impact firsthand, having written and directed for Pose, a Golden Globe– and Emmy-winning drama series featuring a trailblazing cast of transgender heroines. I’ve heard viewers from around the world gush over how the series moves them—how these low-income LGBTQ characters of color, existing in the 1980s at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, gave them a window into the universal struggle to be free: free to live as yourself, and free to love whom you want. As a black trans woman who spent her youth searching for reflection, finally, with Pose, I saw myself vaunted and dignified on a familiar screen. Those images assured me that my life mattered.

>After POSE’s second season, my mentor and frequent collaborator Ryan Murphy offered me an opportunity to time-travel to the gilded age of Hollywood to rewrite some wrongs. He pitched me his newest Netflix limited series, Hollywood, co-created with Ian Brennan, which puts a cast of outsiders, gay people, women over 40, sex workers and people of color at the center of a major Hollywood production set in 1947—just one year after Disney released its racist Song of the South, and seven years after Hattie McDaniel made history as the first black actor to win an Academy Award. We spun a fable about a neglected housewife (Patti LuPone) stepping into power as a studio chief. She greenlights a movie by a gay black writer (Jeremy Pope), starring a black woman (Laura Harrier) who is not a domestic worker or a club singer, but the heroine.

>As we looked to the past, aware of just how broken it was, we realized television gave us an opportunity to imagine what equality could have looked like then, presenting a new vision for the future by centering those pushed to the margins. As we wrote, we asked: What would Hollywood be today if, six decades ago, the powers that be looked like us, and the people onscreen were given an opportunity to be seen in their totality? That question became our compass, allowing us to tell a revisionist history of what we wished Hollywood could be, fully utilizing the platform’s powers for good. And in grappling with that question, we found ourselves examining a culture that too often overlooks the contributions and accomplishments of people of color, a culture that persecutes those who don’t share our beliefs and shuts out gender and sexual minorities.