POSE 106, written by show co-creator Ryan Murphy & Janet Mock, has a great storyline for Stan, the Trump employee with a wife and kids who’s seeing the transgender Angel on the side. All along his story has been really interesting. It’s never clear where exactly it’s headed or what exactly is going on with him.
Having found out what he's doing, his wife Patty tricks him into going with her to see a psychologist. And the scene is very well crafted. Even as he’s betrayed her, Patty approaches him with a kind of care that is atypical for these kinds of scenes, and the shrink too.
Confronted with the question of what exactly his deal is in terms of orientation and attraction, Stan completely breaks
down. He has no answer for them. He just keeps insisting he doesn't know.
There's a version of this story where it's made clear in some way that he's in denial, his "I don't know" a way of saying "I don't want to know". But that's not the story POSE tells. Even as he gets further beats in the final two episodes of the season, he remains a
mystery to us and to himself.
That ends up making for a much more satisfying resolution to his story. In part it just has a greater ring of truth to it. Scripts so often love to drive from mystery to some moment of self-awareness or articulation. But sometimes the greatest truth of all is the acknowledgement of our own limitations and confusion.
But I think it also lands as well as it does because it's truer to the world of the show. POSE is about people owning who they are without having to justify themselves. The demand for explanations or "proof" is understood in this community as a form of violence, a means of silencing and rejecting people whose lives are different. The episode allows Stan his "I don't know" because that's the show. In a way it's right there in the episode title: "Love is the Answer".
Sometimes you're writing into that big moment of self-expression or revelation and you go round and round and nothing seems to work. There can be a lot of reasons for that. But POSE 106 makes me think one question to ask in that situation is, Is this moment that I'm writing true to this character, this world, etc.? Maybe I'm stuck because I'm actually breaking the rules of my story.
