Stated bluntly, Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot is a fairy tale. Refined, reflective, whip smart, and endearing, this play sets to tackle that flash moment in 2017 where a young Prince George visited a landing strip in Hamburg, Germany, looked at a helicopter in little boy wonder and adults of all ages took to the internet to say “wow, he’s visibly enjoying himself way too much — he’s probably going to grow up to be a faggot…”

I was reading this and crying, cause like, if I think about it, I (like many, perhaps) got called “faggot” well before I even knew what the goddamn word meant; so long that I stopped being hurt and started responding “That is correct, yes. How may I help you?”

At the core of the morality tale of this play is the moral conundrum of how very few of us (oh God, a Prince even, or perhaps especially a Prince?) are safe from the perils of unchecked (furthermore unwanted) perception.

Set in a hallucinogenic future (2032), and narrated in parts by a consciously correct chorus, the play deals in an alternate universe where Prince George DOES in fact grow up gay and finds his own Prince Charming — and the chaotic tumult and catharsis that erupts. Finding the love of one’s life while the entire world is watching can in fact simultaneously be a fairy tale as well as a new form of hell; heaven help us all.

Now I can admit that I had my reservations about this play. Firstly, I am (I confess) a cultural swine piece of shit American who is so emotionally checked out on the subject of who exactly  “the leaders of the free world” are, that I approached this beautiful text with a headache.

Dear reader, I deeply implore you to understand that if I look across the linear timeline of what I recall of like, my political engagement in life, all I can say I remember is partying WAY TOO MUCH during The Bush Years (the second “Bush Years”, to be exact) and having a very doubtful existence on paper during every other President I’ve lived through; and this is my experience IN MY OWN COUNTRY MIND YOU — I don’t think I’ve ever actually known a goddamn thing about The Royal Family of the United Kingdom? I shit you not when I tell you I actually had to google what their actual last name was because I had only ever referred to them as “The Royals” (apparently it’s Windsor?).

The action of this play sets to spell out the endless conundrums of (included but not limited to) interracial sex, seemingly contradictory class positions amongst two loving homosexuals, dating a rich white boy, dating an Asian top, poppers, Communist Daddy issues, chaotic bottoms, “ew, my boyfriend is an art major, what will my parents think?”, and also (somehow?) deep ruminations on contemporary dance? This is all tea.

Tannahill, in this offering, being both a concise and beautifully unjaded narrative, has done the heavy lifting of making these very celestial themes of love, duty, commitment, and perhaps most importantly abandon, and made them all Earthbound.

At the brass tax of the moral conundrum of all this drama is the simple fact that be one a divine normal or a future king, most people are (by laws of physics) widely incompatible.

How we deal with and move on from this problem is the stark definition of love.

Heaven help us all.

Faggotry, what and how a faggot does, precedes the faggot himself. Faggotry cries out inside of him, begging for release. “Let me out!” she shrieks, and inevitably he, the Faggot, must. If the Faggot’s worth his salt, they’ll put on a show together.

Prince Faggot is a show of Faggotry blazed to her hungriest, most dazzling ends. It shows us, in flesh, all of what Faggotry can be: plump scrota slapping in the throes of doggy-style, a grown man lisping under a bob wig, closed fists at the family table, Shibari-shackled wrists, a femme queen voguing soft and cunt.

A photograph of Prince GEORGE of Cambridge, at the age of four, is projected.

PERFORMER 1
Prince George of Cambridge in 2017, gazing with limpid amazement at an ascending helicopter.

At top of show, Tannahill shows us the seed from which Prince Faggot sprung: a viral snap of a powerful, world-famous preschooler whose boyishness seems, in this moment, to have given way to girlish “amazement:” knees buckled, wrists limpened, back arched. A boy’s amazement is his disarmament, some fleeting submission to what he feels. But what of a boy’s power? What happens when a particularly powerful boy, someday a powerful man, buckles his knees, limps his wrists, and arches his back? Is he collapsing? Abdicating?

For a Prince, a single gesture can plunge an empire into anarchy, and a faggy gesture spells chaos. Faggotry coos, chants, and shrieks from within; she careens down a marble staircase in a nightgown underneath a chandelier. She seizes her host to ravish a nation, sever a family, or break a law.

It’s not that Faggotry’s out to catch a case (she doesn’t even watch the news or pay her taxes!), it’s that she burns within and for the faggot, whose body is for guiltless joy and whose heart is for boundless love–unless, of course, he asks to be bound! In that case, set the scene. And so does Tannahill: from high and low, with God and the devil, of paupers and princes.

Prince Faggot is a deliberate provocation. It’s blue-chip clickbait, X-rated fanfic, and “punke” with an e–how Shakespeare spelled it to describe whores. Prince Faggot knows it’s a massive fucking stunt because Jordan Tannahill is a massive fucking faggot–one of the best we’ve got, if you ask me. When Faggotry calls, Tannahill answers. He hoists her up, paints her fierce, tells her what to say, and walks her–leashed–onstage to lend us new ways of seeing, feeling, and hearing. Listen up: she’s cooing, chanting, shrieking. Can or will you hear her? What does she want? Would it feel good? Does it scare you? Why? Why not?

I once dated a prince who wanted to be a faggot. He was cool and handsome, a vivid person. Also fucked like a racehorse. I’m a clay-colored faggot who always thought of himself as royalty of some kind, even if it was severed from any origin. In this we weren’t too unlike the characters in Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot, and because it’s good art and an honest play about the power of projections, I imagine a lot of people might see themselves in it.

The prince and I seemed a good match, and we were in love. Maybe we still are. I introduced him to many faggots and women, and we had a lot of fun together. New York glamour fun, parties that tumbled into the morning and sometimes the next afternoon and evening, powdered soups, holy sex. We also talked a lot, about real things. Read books, helped each other get to new places spiritually and intellectually. I don’t think I’ve had conversations like that before or since. When my analyst friend talks about the phenomenon of “joining” I now have a strong feeling in my heart and head of what that means.

At some point things got too intense, we went down too many wrong paths. The idealizations soured and we realized that there were flaws behind our projections. This is normal in nearly any relationship, but sometimes it takes a stronger container to hold these kinds of epiphanies. You need to be able to stay in it long enough to get to the other side and see that some of the idealization is real and most of the projections are your own shit. The container we were in was cracked, for reasons too obscure to get into here.

If you believe in fairy tales like I do you have to believe that people can continue to join after the projections fall away, that this is where a more serious joining comes in. You have to know that it’s hard to do this alone or in a dyad, that it helps to have other people who can take on the splintered shards of fantasy that fly off as we burn through the idealization phase. You have to have a little faith that no one person is any one thing except when we all stand around them and make them so.

In the end, the prince felt like he wasn’t allowed to be a faggot, and it was sad. To be honest I think he embodied the real spirit of faggotry. But many of the ersatz faggots couldn’t acknowledge their prince parts, their attachments to self-regard and shame around wealth and glamour, and things split. I say “in the end,” but I also know that life isn’t a fairy tale and that endings are as much an illusion as any projection. So, we shall see. Beginnings and endings are often twisty, just like they are in Prince Faggot, this beautiful story about all the obstacles we encounter as we try to patch ourselves together into our own imperfect, truthful prince-faggots.