Model and actress Dominique Jackson can’t say a thing about the third and final season of one of the most groundbreaking LGBTQ+ series ever made. It’s mid February when we connect, just weeks before it was announced that seven new episodes of “Pose,” the FX drama about New York’s drag ball subculture during the HIV/AIDS crisis, will premiere May 7. And then it will end, with a tide-changing legacy forever linked to its name.
When it debuted in 2018, the series set a record for the number of out LGBTQ+ people in its cast, especially trans women of color. At the time of our talk, Jackson said the cast was in the process of shooting. But when pushed to offer even the slightest tease of what’s to come, she remained playfully taciturn about her character: “All I can tell you is Elektra is going to be Elektra.”
Elektra Wintour, of course, is the fiercely resilient house mother, who last season formed her new house, the House of Wintour, and went full-on dominatrix. In season two’s last episode, in a leather bustier, with a whip in her hand, she ordered a client to heel. And then there’s that dead client whose body she housed in her apartment.
So no, Jackson’s life doesn’t completely mirror that of her character. But their experiences are, to some degree, shared. Like Elektra, who is the fictional protégé of ball-culture icons like Crystal LaBeija, Pepper LaBeija and Paris Dupree, Jackson also found refuge in the underground world of ballroom culture while in Baltimore and New York in the ’90s, after a period of childhood trauma she experienced while living in the dual-island nation Trinidad and Tobago. She jumped around to several houses primarily populated by Black and Latinx trans outsiders, eventually settling into the House of Sinclair in NYC, a safe haven that helped her survive homelessness and substance abuse.
Aside from her breakout role on “Pose,” Jackson is upending gender norms on the third season of the Starz series “American Gods,” a series about the culture clashing of Old and New Gods. She embodies the latest incarnation of the shape-shifting “Mr. World” as a ferocious, bat-wielding, glam Black woman, now called “Ms. World.”
Just after giving a keynote address at the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change conference, which was virtual this year, Jackson spoke about how reliving Elektra helped her survive the pandemic and why “Pose” actors other than Billy Porter deserve awards acknowledgement. She also explained how the superhero fantasy world of “X-Men” aided in her survival as a trans woman, even though she initially hesitated because “everyone, the people, are talking about it” on the internet. In other words, they really, really want Dominique Jackson to play Storm.
How’re you doing? How has lockdown been for you this past year?
Lockdown was kind of a push to revitalize myself, a push to really look back at myself, look back at my life, understand the things that were happening for me and start to create what I wanted. Of course, in the beginning, there was a panic, there was great fear, there were even times where I just felt like, you know, just give up. Because during the pandemic, we were locked down and it was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m blessed with all these amazing opportunities and now I’m gonna lose them.” There was that fear.
And then George Floyd was murdered and that just pushed everything over the top. And trans women were being murdered back to back every week. I was ready to give up. I didn’t give up, but I was ready to give up. I just felt like there’s no place for us in this world. If they were killing Black men, what are they gonna do to trans women? And there we were being murdered.