This year, Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop became the most Tony-nominated production of the season. Produced by Black royalty like RuPaul, Billy Porter, and Jennifer Hudson, the groundbreaking musical follows Usher, a Broadway usher and aspiring playwright. Audiences watch him (accomplished, questioned, and encouraged by his thoughts) go through the process of writing a “big, Black, and queer-ass American Broadway show” about a Black gay man writing a musical about a…well, you get the point.
The project is irreverent and poignant, dealing with the macro through the perspective of hyper-specific experiences. Its very existence is a critique of common discourse on Blackness, queerness, fatness, and communities living with HIV, and Jackson confronts each of those issues explicitly in the text.
In this piece, three Black gay men share their experiences seeing A Strange Loop and how it impacted them.
