For the Broadway premiere of TheLivingMJ's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, 'A Strange Loop,' UnhappyFem spoke to him about gay sex (or the lack thereof), his love for Liz Phair, and being an outsider
Michael R. Jackson on opening night of A Strange Loop. Photo: Bruce Glikas/Getty Images “I’ve been having this ongoing debate with myself. What is being gay now?” Michael R. Jackson asks me, picking at a bowl of unusually orange bang bang shrimp at the nearly deserted Bobby Van’s Steakhouse on 45th Street.
A Strange Loop’s Usher is in his 20s, and like many a baby-faced NYU graduate is haunted by self-doubt and self-hatred , trapped between his homophobic family whose only understanding of what he could or should be doing was what Tyler Perry does, and a “white gaytriarchy” that he feels both sexually enthralled and belittled by.
A Strange Loop is full of references to the singer-songwriter sexpot who made it in the early ’90s for ripping the male-dominated Chicago rock scene a new one with Exile in Guyville . “To me she was this little superhero character or something. I related to her. I related to the feelings. I did not have the same problems, but I felt like I understood the alienation and the anger and the marginalization,” Jackson tells me.
In 2018, A Strange Loop opened Off Broadway. Today, Usher is played by the 23-year-old Broadway newcomer Jaquel Spivey, who was born the same year Jackson began writing his monologue. “Watching him feels weirdly like that’s my son telling this family story,” Jackson says, before reminding me that Usher is a character he wrote.
“I personally am tired of people trying to tell me what my response to anything artistic has to be,” he says. “Or to decide that because I’m in this category that it’s for me or it’s not for me.” He quotes Robert O’Hara — “Everyone is welcome, and no one is safe” — before also sharing advice from his Holy Ghost: “Tori Amos always says that other people’s interpretation of her music is none of her business.
In the meantime, I meet Michael Walkup, the artistic director of this production company, and his friend. Across the room, Jackson begins chatting up a table of guests picking at paper plates of bar food. “That’s my founder and two of my board members. He’s killing it right now. And he got the food,” Michael coos.
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