GLR January-February 2026

The Other ‘F Word’ Takes the Stage ARTMEMO

J ORDAN S CHILDCROUT I N THE FALL OF 2025, the New York stage offered three separate productions featuring the word “faggot” in their title. Most prominent was Jordan Tannahill’s play Prince Faggot , directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in the summer and returned for a limited off-Broadway engagement later in the year. The central narrative constructs a fantasy future in which college-age Prince George of Wales brings his boyfriend Dev to meet the royal family. The play depicts a world in which gay ro mance has been assimilated into the cultural mainstream, allowing for a gay royal wed ding filled with pomp and pageantry. Less acceptable, however, is Prince George’s sex life. The heir to the throne is a submissive bottom to Dev’s dominant top, symbolically inverting the historical power dynamic be tween Britain and India, and the play in cludes graphic depictions of their role-playing kink in the bedroom. (The audi ence’s phones are also treated to a bit of BDSM, “blindfolded” and locked away in pouches for the duration of the perform ance.) After Dev ends their relationship, George goes down a self-negating spiral of chem-sex oblivion, much to the horror of his royal parents. Even for a beloved blue-eyed prince, the faggotry of S/M, hard drugs, and orgies falls outside the bounds of propriety. Prince Faggot , then, speaks to a tension between the acceptability or even the val orization of gay identity and the alienation, shame, and fear of rejection that still cling to queerness. A pleasant fairy tale of regal ro mance like the film Red, White & Royal Blue (2023) notwithstanding, Tannahill’s play asks earnestly: are we princes, or are we faggots? Who has the dignity and legiti macy of royalty, and who bears the stigma of the abnormal and illicit? Lexicographers argue about the origin of the term “faggot,” but most agree that its use to refer to queer men was first seen in print in 1913, in a guide to criminal slang that ref erenced “fagots” who “will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight.” More than a cen tury later, the social media marketing cam paign for Prince Faggot , in order to meet the strictures of online community stan dards, often elided printing the term, with variations including Prince F*ggot, Prince F, and #princefplay. Despite contemporary caution about the slur, “faggot” has frequently been used in the self-representation of queer men in the theater. Indeed, it’s spoken repeatedly in the

work often cited as the first modern gay play, Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright , which premiered off-off Broadway at the Caffe Cino in 1964. The main character is an aging queen—in this case not royalty but an effeminate homosex ual with an aristocratic title added ironically to his name. Alone in his room, he looks in the mirror and tells himself: “You. Are a faggot. There is no question about it any more—you are definitely a faggot. You’re funny but you’re a faggot.” A decade later, in one of the longest-run ning hits in Broadway history, a Puerto Rican dancer in A Chorus Line (1975) con fesses: “One day I looked at myself in the mirror and said ‘You’re fourteen years old and you’re a faggot. What are you going to do with your life?’” These mirror scenes re flect how the theatre itself has often func tioned for queer people as a cultural site in which we might see ourselves, the mirror we hold up to our own image, seeking the truth of our existence. But these private scenes of self-reflection take place in public venues and therefore are open to debate within a community con cerned with positive representation. In 1973 Al Carmines’ off-Broadway musical revue TheFaggot caused some controversy over its scenes of lecherous old men in bars, male prostitution, and a satirical number about closet cases with the refrain “Anything’s bet ter than being a faggot.” Noting the tension between the esteemed and the abject, The New York Times found that Carmines’ musi cal contained “an ambivalence that insists upon the seaminess of what is presumably being extolled.” Other critics agreed, stating that the show confirmed “that it is simultane ously miserable and terrific to be a faggot.” When the acclaimed historian and libera tion activist Martin Duberman accused The Faggot of “self-exploitation” and “damag ing frivolity,” Carmines responded: “As an artist, I am committed only to the absolute human truth as I see it. And that truth is far more complicated than any party line, how ever noble, could ever be.” Carmines further asserted: “My domain—if I have one—is that crack between ideologies where contra dictory, frustrating, unideological, stinking, and thrilling humanity raises its head.” The fault line between princely nobility and ignoble faggotry was evident in two other performances of the 2025 season, both contemporary theatrical riffs on literary works from the 1970s. Figaro/Faggots at the Baryshnikov Arts Center offered director Kevin Carillo’s mashup of Mozart’s comic opera about marriage and Larry Kramer’s

satirical 1978 novel. Living in New York City at the height of the gay liberation movement, the protagonist seeks romantic monogamy in a subculture saturated in alco hol, drugs, and anonymous sex. With self esteem and social legitimacy upheld as ideals, Kramer’s fictional stand-in pro claims: “It takes courage not to be a faggot just like all the others. ... I’m not a faggot. I’m a Homosexual Man.” This rejection of faggotry stands in marked contrast to The Faggots and Their Friends between Revolutions (1977) by Larry Mitchell, adapted by composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman, origi nally performed at the Manchester Interna tional Festival, and brought to the New York Armory in December 2025. Mitchell’s prose-poem-manifesto presents an allegory of queer community involving the ongoing battle of the faggots, fairies, queens, and women who love women against “the men.” Mitchell celebrates his radical outsiders, ex plaining: “The men’s fantasies are about control and domination and winning. The faggots’ fantasies are about love and sex and solidarity.” What accounts for this group of faggots returning to the theater in 2025? Perhaps it’s just coincidence. Perhaps it’s a younger gen eration’s nostalgia for the sexual and politi cal ethos of an era they never experienced. Perhaps it’s the thrill of the taboo in the “de generate” and “unsavory.” Or perhaps, after decades of social and political progress, all these faggots are the response to the current backlash against LGBT equality, giving voice to renewed feelings of abjection but also to rage and resistance. From the era of gay liberation to today, the word “faggot” has carried an array of meanings, marking the sexually abnormal, the insufficiently masculine, and the socially rejected. But the plays that use the slur in their title can also show the joy and power of the word. Near the end of Prince Faggot , the Black trans actress N’yomi Allure Stew art steps out of character to describe her true experience of being crowned “Princess of the Pier” within New York’s ballroom cul ture. The moment is moving because we recognize that so many forces in our current society are working to diminish Stewart’s dignity, but she can take pride in her own brand of royalty. And if the audience can see the nobility in her, perhaps we can also see it in ourselves. Jordan Schildcrout, professor of theater at SUNY-Purchase, is co-editor of FiftyKey Figures in Queer US Theatre (2022).

TheG & LR

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