When Lena Waithe accepted her Trailblazer Award at June’s MTV Movie & TV Awards ceremony, she used her speech to pay tribute to the trailblazers who appeared in 1990’s Paris Is Burning — a movie that paved the way for FX’s Pose.
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“A lot of the people featured in this film are no longer with us, but their legacies will never die because they live on in all of us,” Waithe said. “And every time someone says ‘shade’ or talks about ‘reading’ or decides to serve face for no reason at all, please look up to the sky and give thanks because we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. They strutted through a brick wall so we wouldn’t have to.”
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