On this chapter of The Queerest Things I Watched Last Week, we say an emotional farewell to Candy on Pose, and a couple of ladies from Nova’s past make an appearance on Queen Sugar.
- Pose – Season 2 Episode 4 “Never Knew Love Like This Before” [Live]
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Candy is up to her self-centered shenanigans and crashes a category she is not appropriate for.
Candy’s surly attitude does make her hard to love, but everyone is really piling on her this episode.
Candy crashes a meeting of Ball MCs and insists they add Lip-Synch as an official category. Pray says this isn’t the Gong Show and denies her. Candy is so mad that she threatens Pray with a knife before making her exit. However, the next day, Candy is missing.
Lulu tells Blanca Candy has been turning tricks at a seedy hotel to make ends meet. Sadly, Candy is found dead at the hotel.
The community rallies to recover her body and give her a proper funeral. During the funeral, many characters have a scene with Candy’s ghost.
The ghost thing became a little over-the-top, but I loved it. I think it’s more difficult to mourn someone you had a complicated relationship with, and these scenes with Candy’s ghost let each character deal with that.
At the end of the the funeral the MCs announce they will be adding a lip-synch category in honor of Candy.
Candy’s ghost makes one last appearance and lip-synchs “Never Knew Love Like This” by Stephanie Mills.
It was the perfect ending to an emotional episode.
The brutal killing of a queer character is usually a tragic event that leaves us traumatized from yet another BYQ death. However, take a look at how it is done when you have a queer writing and production team. We never saw Candy get killed. If this had been written by straight, cis people, I would bet we would have seen it, and it would have been brutally violent. Most of the episode is about celebrating her life, as challenging as it was, and did not focus on tragedy.
Nearly 30 years later, Violence against transgender women of color is still at crisis levels. This is a story that needs to be told. And this episode is a case study in how you can tell realistic queer stories without making it tragedy porn.
The only thing making me feel better after that episode was seeing Angelica Ross (the woman who plays Candy on Pose) tweet this announcement:
I will miss Candy on Pose, but I can’t wait to see her in this new role! Long live Candy!
- Queen Sugar – Season 4 Episode 5 “Face Speckled” [Live]
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Last week I didn’t write about Queen Sugar, because I was too busy expressing my Tales of the City feelings, but 2 episodes ago Chantal happened.
I thought that kiss was a little forward, but hello, Chantal, nice to see you again!
Nova did call her up later, but Chantal was annoyed Nova didn’t just stop by her place like she asked.
I didn’t totally understand why Chantal got so mad over the call, but this just added more to the conflict pile growing in Nova’s life since her book went public.
On last week’s episode, Nova got trolled on her book tour by a former professor named Octavia.
Nova goes to Octavia’s house to confront her and walks into a group of her students ready to analyze her book. Nova is angry at Octavia’s game-playing, but she joins in.
We soon realize Octavia was Nova’s Professor Shane back in college.
After a day of giving Nova a hard time, Octavia shoos the students out of her house and then switches gears into seduction mode. She reminisces about all the time they spent together back in the day, and it works like a charm on Nova.
Academic bullshittery and professors with over-inflated egos manipulating their students are not my favorite subject matter.
I do not trust Octavia at all. I think she was mad Nova didn’t mention her in her book and wanted to see if she could publicly take her down and seduce her in the same day. I find the whole thing creepy, but I’ll keep watching to see how this plays out.
I swear next week I will continue my love letter to Tanya Saracho in addition to recapping my weekly shows.
