The Bechdel Test is based on the cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s challenge to cinema that two women must speak to each other about something other than a male. Just as with its intellectual antecedent, Virginia Woolf’s critique of fiction writing, the rule applies to female women, rather than males — regardless of males’ dress or body modification.

Pose is an anthem for gender-nonconforming males: it features gay male characters and trans people who are genetically male. All the primary characters, main and side, are males. The series’ roster of actors overwhelmingly includes males.

Pose paints itself as anti-hetero-normative — hetero-normative is a politically-charged phrase that most simply refers to culture’s continual regurgitation of human’s sexually dimorphic capacities, that there are males and females who must pair for sexual reproduction and people’s uneasiness with this fact of life. The series centers on gay male life in 1980s New York City. What is notable about the series is that it is primarily focused on the lives of males, and does not even pretend to investigate or interrogate what it means to be a gay, gender-nonconforming female during this time period and geographic region.

Ironically, the series commits the cardinal sin of hetero-normative narratives: it uses (female) women as sexual and emotional props for men to live out their fantasies. There are only four female characters (the forgiving wife, the nurturing dance teacher, the care-taking nurse, the surgeon who affirms males’ right to be women) who have legitimate speaking roles that marginally develop their characters. Their dialogue revolves entirely around the males in their lives; their dialogue primarily supports the development of males’ egos. From the silent eye-candy secretaries in the hetero-normative stereotype of the Trumpian Manhattan real estate office to the voiceless nurses who nurture and hold vigil over the dying (primarily male) HIV/AIDS patients, female actresses are used to prop-up males identities throughout season one.

The Bechdel Test

Can the Bechdel Test be fulfilled by males who speak to each other using female pronouns? Does it apply to males who speak to each other wearing makeup, skirts or heels? Does the Bechdel Test apply to males who refer to themselves as “mothers” or “daughters?”

First, it should be noted that the Bechdel Test comes from Virginia Woolf’s critique of fiction where she noticed the absence of women’s experience decoupled from women’s expected role as a prop for males. Woolf considered females’ lives outside of their relation to males as important literary subject-matter, and she regarded it as strange that this reality of women’s existence went unnoticed by male writers. When the Bechdel Test is investigated academically in media studies’ quantitative and qualitative examinations, researchers are careful to denote their search for female characters. It is clear that the Bechdel Test refers to female women, rather than males.

Why is it important that females’ realities are represented outside the prism of male conceptions? Perhaps the same reasons why female sports are important. Or perhaps the same reasons why women’s representation in STEM fields is important. If males could simply call themselves women and take STEM field scholarships for women and stand on the podiums of women’s sports competitions, for example, then women are pushed to the backfield as window-dressing for males’ lives. As window-dressing, women’s bodies are reduced to the objects that men use to produce more of themselves. Woolf, and several other women, are understandably bothered by the misogynist male tautology that males are or can be made the same as women and therefore, the lives of women (outside of the necessity of reproduction, i.e. producing more males) are socially, politically, economically, or sexually unimportant, obsolete, unnecessary or otherwise eclipsed by males.

Males continually fantasize about eliminating women (“genetic women” or “gennys”) from public and private life by usurping women’s perceived usefulness due to the misunderstanding that males can also be females. This misconception is buttressed by the supposition that women exist only to service males’ needs. Who better to understand the needs of males than other males?

Must Pose Pass The Bechdel Test?

Absolutely not. Pose romanticizes a period of time where males, primarily gay and gender-nonconforming, gave themselves license to celebrate their gender variance and critiques of hetero-normative constrictions on dress, body modification, fashion and affectation. These critiques are nothing short of art. Males were the primary audience, performers, and judges at balls. Balls were a safe place for males to express any aspect of self-presentation that they felt. In the late 1980s, it was liberating to venerate the lives of gay males when so many were vilified by mainstream audiences for dying from the HIV/AIDS epidemic due to sex practices that included prostitution, drug use, and bathhouse hookup culture.

During the period of time Pose portrays, gay males were chastised for their sexual habits and drug use. Pose, perhaps intentionally, addresses this conflict between hetero-normative expectations and the realities of gay life, which were under intense scrutiny due to the epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS. Pose turns this “othered” style of living into something hetero-normatively palatable: the first season is replete with characters desiring long-term, monogamous relationships; gay male sexuality is redefined as heterosexual, where one male is given license to retain his heterosexuality because his male partner has undergone extreme body-modification to mimic female physical traits, sometimes including women’s perceived “missing penis” through castration; and, lastly, the most obvious intervention in the queerness and otherness of gay life, the establishment of a household, where one male plays “mother” to “daughters” (also male) and sons — no females are present in this extended familial relationship that lionizes hetero-normative households. Oddly, no fathers are represented either.

So, After All That, Does Pose Pass the Bechdel Test?

No, Pose does not pass the Bechdel Test. It doesn’t even attempt to address the realities of being female in the 1980s New York City metropolitan area. What should be notable is that the series does attempt to mimic hetero-normative cultural expectations in an effort to venerate gay males and to excuse gay males’ rights to exist. What we should be careful to understand is that gay males, regardless of their propensity for engaging in prostitution, their practice of cohabiting with (often underage) “house boys,” their promiscuity, drug use, or HIV/AIDS infection rates, are just as human as the rest of us and their lifestyle should be excused for what it is: humanity.

Pose highlights and exploits continual anxieties of acceptance among gay males. The series lays bare the adaptations undertaken by gay males to fit into hetero-normative expectations: it whitewashes gay sex using “womanhood,” it excuses gay habitation and cultural inculcation practices using “motherhood,” and it sanitizes gays’ occupation of space, their rights to assemble publicly and privately, using “community” and “family.”