'Your God Made Me This Way': Religion, Race, and Queer Love in the Drama Series Pose

This chapter analyses the religious imagery in the ground-breaking series Pose, which focuses on New York City’s ballroom culture – the queer of colour subculture in the 1980s–1990s. The FX series is lauded for its inclusion of a majority of Black and Latinx queer people in its cast and crew, as well as for its layered and complex representation of queer lives. This chapter analyses the representation of religion in Pose’s final season as an example of the potential of cultural productions to imagine alternative, queer and Black conceptions of the divine and the future. Adopting Afrofuturism as a central conceptual resource, the chapter explores how in the series a critical deconstruction or subversion of religion takes the form of creative and hopeful (re)imagination with a view to empowerment and social transformation. The chapter argues that, by grappling with the complicated intersections of queerness and faith, the show offers a way to move beyond a simplistic opposition of religion and LGBTQI people and enables a recognition of the queer potential of religion, as well as the importance of religious imagery for creating hope in the racist, homophobic and transphobic environment where the series is situated.