Do you remember Truth or Dare ((Alex Kerkishian, 1991) ) aka In Bed With Madonna in the UK? It’ s the film that documented Madonna’s ‘Blonde Ambition Tour’, the one where she wore Jean-Paul Gaultier’s conical bra and called Warren Beatty a pussy. Strike a Pose is a film about six of her back-up dancers on that tour — Carlton Wilborn, Oliver Crumes, Salim Gauwloos, Kevin Alexander Stea, Jose Gutierrez, and Luis Camacho (the seventh, Gabriel Trupin, succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1995) — where they’re at twenty five years later and how the tour and the film changed their lives.

I saw Truth or Dare in Vancouver, where I was then living, and there was a scene where Madonna and her back-up dancers play truth or dare, spin the bottle, and the dare is for one man to kiss another. I remember the audience in that screening gasping in disgust at the sight. It was an ‘us and them’ moment, Madonna being part of the ‘us’ and it’s one of the reasons I’ll love her forever.

It was 1991. So many friends my age were dying. I was writing a column for Angles, the local gay paper, and felt I was going to a funeral on a monthly basis, ceremonies made more poignant by often taking place outdoors in Stanley Park, amidst the sublime natural beauty that is Vancouver’s, by the sea, with the Rockies as majestic background, all of us crying over death in front of so much beauty; the friends attending, the family –often still afraid of contagion and making their disavowal evident by their absence; the community, solidarity and hope embodied by those who did gather. And in that cinema, whilst Madonna presented us with youth, beauty, desire, flirtation, freedom, the straight audience laughed and sneered; at one of our lowest and most vulnerable moments as a community.

Whilst straights voiced disgust, for many young gay men, a generation younger than I, Madonna, Truth or Dare, ‘Express Yourself’, and that kiss in the film represented a transformative moment, a moment in which they recognised themselves, one where they saw there were other people like them. One of the ways Strike a Pose frames the tour and the film is as key and iconic moments of transformation in the Gay Liberation Movement, one entirely interlaced with fights against AIDS, almost that precise moment where ‘gay’ gave way to ‘queer’. There’s a wonderful scene in Strike a Pose where Madonna stops the concert to speak about her close friend, artist Keith Haring, who’d died just a few weeks previously: He ‘was a man who had the courage to tell the truth. The truth is, he was gay. The truth is, he had AIDS. And he said so to anybody who would listen.’ So much of the tour, and of the film of the tour, was about how liberating it was to ‘express yourself’.

Yet, Strike a Pose, demonstrates how expressing oneself was something not everyone could afford or dared do. Whilst gay audiences were admiring the beauty and the freedom the dancers embodied, many of the dancers themselves were hiding secrets they dared not voice.. Salim Gauwloos, one of the dancers, had himself been diagnosed with HIV in 87, at the age of eighteen, after his first sexual encounter. He’d told no one then, and his mother would be his only confidante on this issue for several years. He was behind Madonna when she spoke of Keith Haring’s freedom and looking at the footage twenty years later says ‘I look petrified. I can’t wait to get offstage.’ Carlton Wilburn was diagnosed whilst on tour in Japan. A third, Gabriel Trupin died of complications from AIDS in 1995, and we see in this film his mother’s continuing anger and bitterness over this.

Strike a Pose! is more than one of those ‘Where Are They Now?’ documentaries. It highlights the significance of cultural production — something as banal as the representation of a kiss – in historical struggles of liberation. The film is at its best when doing that, showing us how Jose and Luis became stars, the letters Salim (aka Slam) got over the kiss, etc. It’s at its worst in the latter part of the film, an ‘express yourself today’ moment where the spin the bottle scene from Truth or Dare transforms into a ‘coming out as HIV-positive’ scene in Strike a Pose but comes across as manipulative and slightly coercive.

Strike a Pose is trying to demonstrate how whereas these dancers couldn’t express themselves then, they can now. I’m not convinced. In any case, it’s an interesting film, one which shows how the wimp and wannabe in all of us can co-exist with courage and valour. I enjoyed it very much.  It’s currently on Netflix.

José Arroyo