Steven Canals is quietly sitting here. He’s wearing what he's wearing, and no one knows that it's this man who created the most glamorous, most ostentatious, most eleganza-packed show on TV right now. He is, after all, the co-creator and executive producer of FX’s breakout success Pose, the LGBTQ ballroom melodrama that has become a hit for not only its style but its heart. On a Wednesday morning, Canals blends in with the other New Yorkers grabbing breakfast at the Upper East Side café Irving Farm, sporting black-rimmed glasses, a neon blue sweatshirt with a pin that says “Shh. Stop Talking,” and a knapsack. The only difference is that he is, in fact, preparing for the ball, even if he doesn’t look like it.

You would also never know from Canals’s demeanor that it’s just less than a week until Pose’s Season Two premiere. There are no worry lines, no exasperation. His bites of overnight oats are as measured as his speech. Today he’s happy to be home. “Now, with the city being cleaned up and gentrification, the city has a different personality and vibe. I miss it,” Canals, 38, says.

Although you’ve probably associated Pose with Canals’s co-creator and powerhouse Hollywood producer, Ryan Murphy, and his partner, Brad Falchuk, the duo behind American Horror Story, Glee, and Scream Queens. But Pose really begins with Canals.

The kernel of the idea for Pose first formed for Steven Canals in college. After a professor screened Jennie Livingston’s ballroom documentary, Paris Is Burning, for Canals’s class his junior year, he contemplated how the canonical film would make an enticing TV show. The way he envisioned it: an homage to his beloved film Flashdance in which a young black boy who wants to be a dancer moves to New York and gets enmeshed in a war between two house mothers. “I was like, ‘I can’t wait to see that,’ ” he says of the story. “I just never thought I would be the person to tell it.”

While Canals has lived in Los Angeles for the past seven years, his roots stretch back to the Bronx. Growing up as a black, brown, and queer youth in the 1980s, Canals experienced a bleak, gritty city, living in housing projects during the HIV and crack epidemics. “It was a really scary time, and I was a really sensitive boy,” he recalls. But Canals found solace in spending a lot of time at home watching film classics. His father’s passion for movies ignited his own as Canals was introduced to the works of directors like Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola. “My mom, in particular, was very overprotective and scared that the city might swallow me whole,” he says. But staying inside and watching movies? It kept Canals occupied.

At 15, as New York emerged from the crack epidemic in the mid-’90s only to be swallowed by a new wave of gang violence, Canals found solace in movies. He joined an after-school program, called Youth Ministries for Peace & Justice, that allowed him to focus on creating stories of his own for the first time. For nearly eight months, Canals and nine of his classmates worked on producing a documentary short about turf violence. Then, a week before they were finished editing the documentary, one of his classmates, a co-producer on the project, was shot and killed. “Her death is probably the greatest catalyst for me to say ‘I want to become a filmmaker,’ because I went from being someone who was highlighting an experience to suddenly having the experience,” he says. Canals recalls something his mom used to say: “From death emerges new life.” He didn’t want his classmate’s death to be in vain. “That was the moment I knew I needed to devote my life in some way to telling a story,” he says.