If you haven’t been paying attention, you could easily dismiss the Starz drama P-Valley as just a show about strippers. In actuality, the stripping — depicted as a form of strength and exceptional talent — is merely a vehicle to illustrate stories of struggle, love, and the freedom to exist. Though centering sex workers on television still inspires a good amount of pearl-clutching, it isn’t the strippers who’ve received backlash during season 2, whose finale aired Sunday. The recent sex scenes between the show’s Black gay characters have been heavily scrutinized, even as those radical depictions of queer love continue to progress conversations around tolerance.
Set in the fictional, deep-South town of Chucalissa, Mississippi, P-Valley follows the lives of a strip club’s non-binary den mother, Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan), and their flock of dancers. Season 1 introduced a budding yet under wraps connection between the ultra-femme Clifford and actor J. Alphonse Nicholson’s character Lil Murda, a rising, street-tough trap rapper hiding his sexual inclinations as he catapults into local fame. Of course, it’s tricky to view a show solely through the lens of social media, but P-Valley is the type of series that inspires digital water cooler conversation, and while some viewers have taken offense to Uncle Clifford and Lil Murda’s romantic advances, those in the queer community have come to love them for their representation. It wasn’t until season 2, when Lil Murda reunites with Big Teak — a previously incarcerated and emotionally burdened childhood friend and lover played by John Clarence Stewart — that the backlash reached fever pitch.
