SANDRA BERNHARD ON LEAVING BITCHY BEHIND
The “Pose” actress and queer-TV trailblazer was embraced by the drag demimonde in her ferocious days but has a gentle vibe in person.
I miss seeing you on television!” an elderly woman named Renee squawked at her neighbor the actress, comedian, and singer Sandra Bernhard. They were in front of the stately brick Frederic Fleming House, on West Twenty-second Street, a residence for formerly homeless New Yorkers, where Renee has lived for sixteen years.
“But, honey, you see me all the time,” Bernhard replied. (She walks her dog, George, along the block daily.)
Renee, who has no teeth and a quantity of chin hair, eyed Bernhard up and down and told her, “You look different on television!” Bernhard is starring in the second season of “Pose,” the Ryan Murphy drama about the gritty, glamorous world of transgender women and gay men who staged New York’s legendary drag balls. She plays an activist nurse at Roosevelt Hospital during the height of the aids crisis.
“We’ll put your show on the schedule,” Martha Binikos, Fleming House’s manager, who was passing by, promised.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Bernhard said. “This place keeps the neighborhood grounded in old New York—like there’s still a place where people can live, and not be pushed out by twenty-million-dollar apartments.”
Season 2 of “Pose” is set in 1990, when there were still hookers on the piers and Madonna’s “Vogue” video introduced the culture of ballrooms to viewers of MTV. It was a time when Bernhard and Madonna were tight—they were often photographed out together, like a kind of two-headed It Girl. “It was really fun. We would go to parties and be bitchy—we were bitchy to Joan Rivers,” Bernhard said. “I had a little crush on her, and I loved that people were, like, ‘Ooh, Madonna likes Sandy!’ ” continue reading…