Before he went on to strike a pose with Madonna in the 1990 classic “Vogue” video and her subsequent Blonde Ambition Tour, José Gutiérrez Xtravaganza made his first fierce moves on the Christopher Street pier on the West Side Highway. It was there, as a 16-year-old, that he discovered the runway-ready dance that twirled out from the underground culture of black and Latin gay men in the ’80s.
“I automatically fell in love with it,” says Gutiérrez, who hit the pier with some older students who were also studying dance at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. “I was like, ‘What is this?’ It was something like a face-off. The different ‘houses’ would battle each other with this attitude. Voguing is 80 percent attitude, I always say.”
That attitude is being served, and that movement is being celebrated in the new FX series “Pose.” The show’s set in the mid-’80s, during the height of the New York ballroom scene, where “houses” were like families and voguing was the mode of expression. For Gutiérrez, now 48, it wasn’t so much about who would take home the grand prize in competition, it was about finding himself as a young gay man and being a part of a community.
“It was like discovering this whole world,” says Gutiérrez, who also appeared in the landmark 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” that went inside the ballroom scene. “I was so inspired by people like me, my own kind. It was really welcoming. Seeing that so early on, it opened me up to so many things artistically and personally because I identified.”
Gutiérrez encountered the House of Xtravaganza on the pier, quickly impressed them with his skills and joined their ranks, adopting their name as his own. “They were like a fashion gang, kind of like a ‘West Side Story’ feel,” he says.
Being of Dominican descent, though born and raised in the East Village, Gutierrez was also drawn to the fact that the House of Xtravaganza was predominantly Latino. “They were looked upon to be so different,” he says. “I wanted to be a part of that.”
But after being discovered by Madonna at Manhattan’s legendary Sound Factory nightclub, Gutiérrez took voguing and ballroom culture to the mainstream first in the “Vogue” video and then all around the world in the tour. When he returned to New York, though, AIDS had taken its toll on the scene.
“It was really good, and then it got really bad with the AIDS epidemic,” he recalls. “It had such an effect. Everyone got really scared. It was like people dying everywhere, sick in the hospital. I was losing my friends.”
But Gutiérrez was determined to carry on the legacy despite all those losses. He remained active in the House of Xtravaganza and eventually became that family’s “father” in the late ’90s. “I knew that we still had this family,” he says. “It became more about taking care of each other and those that had survived, licking our wounds.”
Now, though, Gutiérrez gets to see some of those who passed away come back to life on “Pose,” thanks to show co-creator Ryan Murphy. “He took the stories of a lot of these people who are no longer here, who appear in ‘Paris Is Burning,’ and somewhat gave them life.”