Dark Decyphering the Racial Drama of Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot

A drama is enacted every day in colonized countries.
–Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

…it seems that being visible does not always translate into being “seen,”
being truly recognized as a person deserving of rights, care, and dignity.
–Nathan Alexander Moore, “Transliminality: Black Transfemmes and the Limit of Visibility Politics”

Last fall, accompanied by some friends, I went to see Prince Faggot, written by Jordan Tannahill, a white gay playwright from Canada. I like to be surprised, so I hadn’t looked at any synopses or reviews prior to walking into the Studio Seaview theatre. Had I, I might have elected to remain in SoHo where I was set to imbibe the sweet notes of jazz covers offered in tribute to the recently departed R&B visionary D’Angelo. In truth, I was immediately drawn to Prince Faggot for its provocative title. I’ve been thinking a lot about faggotry, a personal journey culminating in the publication of an article on Moonlight (2016) in 2025 in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

That essay, named “I’d do anything for you (in the dark)” after another R&B singer and fellow Black faggot, Frank Ocean, considers how attempts to be queer or straight—in both Black and white contexts—rely upon the encircling and disavowal of the no-thing I call the “darkfaggot.” The darkfaggot is not a person or a figure that can be touched or perceived, but an absence that constantly escapes representation while simultaneously being essential to the act of representing oneself both on and off-stage. Specifically, I write that it is the “idea of redoubled non-be-longing,” a socially repressed entity that neither belongs nor exists as a being altogether. Because the darkfaggot does not exist in the form of an empirical human being, it does not correspond to the willing inhabitation of a particular gender and/or sexual identity. Instead, the darkfaggot is a haint-like force of abjection that variably possesses a constellation of Black subjects already excommunicated to the margins of both Black and nonBlack belonging such as transwomen, transmen, gay men, lesbians, non-binary people, and other queer and gender nonconforming Black folks. Once cloaked in the spirit of darkfaggotry by the eyes, mouths, and sometimes fists of onlookers, these subjects are made to feel like they, too, don’t exist, which is experienced as an enforced silencing, invisibility, or indeed, a premature and dramatic death. When it comes to the darkfaggot and those forced to bear the weight of hyperinvisibility, the dam dividing the spectacular from the mundane is dangerously porous.

In the following reflection, I deploy a creative-intellectual practice I call “dark decypherment” to think through how the “wild and undisciplined” Prince Faggot, as described by New York Times critic Jesse Green, erects its own world against and atop the shadowy ground of the darkfaggot. As I have developed the concept, dark decypherment is a mode of cultural meta-critique that traces the patterns of the perceptible to sketch an uncertain impression of the imperceptible structure of anti-Blackness that delimits the terms of perception, representation, and belonging in our colonial drama, one portrayed by Prince Faggot. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison writes that “for the most part, the literature of the United States,” and I would add North America as a whole, “has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man.” Through a dark decypherment of both Prince Faggot and my experience as a Black non-binary viewer, I aim to rupture the discursive scaffolding of this new white man. In the end, this meditation initiates the overturning of the poetic reproduction of white imperial faggotry by directing the force of my metacritique at the very ground of white queer belonging the play valiantly refortifies on behalf of a colonial-racial apparatus. In this way, I author this meditation in the spirit of darkfaggotry, which is reflected in both its confrontational posture and the inflection points of its analysis.

*****

Mask in tow, I walk into the midtown theatre and am immediately struck by a sea of older white faggots. Again, I don’t know what I was expecting, but I assumed the diversity of the Black and Brown, gay and trans cast would be reflected in the eyes gazing back at them. I swallowed my initial reservations and marched up the stairs to wait for my friends to arrive. I sat opposite the bar and modeled my colorful Mifland puffer jacket and shiny Doc Marten loafers, giving off an air of “I am that nigga, but I’m not your negro” because I know how these crowds can be. Apparently my defensive aura of stand-offish Black faggotry wasn’t off-putting enough because while waiting for a pre-show drink, two white women—inch by inch—tried to skip me in line to get to their glass of red wine. “You know I was here before you, right?” twists their faces into feigned confusion like a sour lemon. This Black talks back. After also reminding the bartender of my obvious yet seemingly muted presence before him, I grab an IPA and walk into the theatre to claim my seat, but not before being skipped by another white woman.

*****

The play began with the actors resting at the front of the stage, debating over an image of the young Prince George and the ethics of naming his apparent, if still forming, queerness as such. Personally, I feel that we shouldn’t be labeling the emerging sexuality of children in either direction, gay or straight. My opinion was backed by Performer 2 (K. Todd Freeman). Unlike Performer 2, however, my reasoning is not rooted in fear of being called a “groomer,” a label frequently attached to gays regardless of our actual actions and despite the reality that the overwhelming majority of sexual predators identify as heterosexual.

Despite my own reasoning, I was nonetheless thrown off by the levity of Performer 5 (David Greenspan). Responding to Performer 2, he quips, “Frankly, I think we’ve been doing a terrible job at grooming. I mean look at how many straights there still are.” Something about this exchange between a Black gay man and his white counterpart crystalized my apprehension towards white gay men and their seemingly singular focus on sexual deviancy and provocateurship. Is there really ever a time to make a joke about grooming children, even if we all understand the fictitiousness of such vitriolic allegations? This moment reminded me of debates circulating the Twittersphere years ago where white gay men refused to forgo public sex during Pride festivities, a choice that declines to make space for adolescent queers in search of guidance and community. In refusing the norm to forge a kind of subversive gay belonging, they become the strangulating patriarchs they rebuke through the backdoor, no pun intended.

Performer 2 seemed to function as the archetypal consciousness I could most relate to. I’m still trying to figure out if this is related to his being one of two Black characters in Prince Faggot. Nonetheless, he made another point I resonated with in response to Performer 1’s (Mihir Kumar) numbingly self-righteous diatribe legitimizing his recognition of a child’s unformed queerness as a kind of care. Performer 2 asked something akin to: Does caring for the young, effeminate Prince George entail speculating about an image of him to an audience of adult strangers? That question, to me, gestures towards an appropriate practice of care for queer youth, the preservation of their vulnerable innocence by guarding it from the poking and prodding of a consumptive world eager to know. Nonetheless, each performer took turns displaying their baby pictures on a screen behind them and noting the tell-tale signs of their budding queerness and/or transness…

That is, until we arrived at Performer 4. Instead of an image, the audience was offered a dark abyss where a childhood photograph of Performer 4, played by the radiant doll N’yomi Allure Stewart, would otherwise belong. I was immediately struck because, as I previously explained, the darkfaggot conditions representation. In the context of theatre, this means that everything that we can see and hear on stage unfolds atop a disavowed ground that we cannot see and hear. In this case, that ground was the young Stewart, whose young, Black waywardness was repressed from the nostalgic catharsis that every actor before her partook in. “Oh lord,” I thought to myself at the sight of her adolescent absence, and I swiftly pulled out my notepad and ink pen, a choreography attracting the skepticism of the white eyes around me. I shirked their gaze, sipped my beer, and crossed my legs in anticipation of a night that was going to be a longer night than expected. Performer 4 then announced she would be playing both the “servant” and the sister of the Prince Faggot, and I understood her role was to be a side character. Ultimately, she would function as a prop through which the play could actualize its aspirations: the deification of the white faggot embodied in the character of Prince George.

Recalling Morrison, Prince Faggot disciplines the character closest in proximity to the unseen absence of the darkfaggot, Performer 4, into functioning as the imaginary ground upon which a metaphysical architecture can be built that secures the sanctity of a new kind of white gay post-modern subjectivity represented in both the character of Prince George and the primary audience of Tannahill’s play. This discursive cannibalization of the darkfaggot, which corresponds to material violences like I myself suffered during my viewing of the play, prefigures the edification of the white (and brown) faggots we can see unfold on and off-stage. Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican writer and critic, argues that the essential function of aesthetics and the act of representation is to collectively season and bind the taste of individual viewers to a governing principle. As the play erects itself over and against the darkfaggot, Prince Faggot performs this function for its white gay audience, thereby training them to properly belong within the architecture secured by anti-Blackness.

*****

In addition to muting Stewart to propel the play’s fraught narrative, Prince Faggot’s flirtation with the big Black c*ck trope, particularly with its onstage absence of a gay Black man, also alerted me to the absent presence of the darkfaggot. In Black Skin, White Masks, anti-colonial psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon argues that, within the collective European cultural unconscious, Black people with penises are reduced to walking phalluses that invite lust and fear even in their physical absence. Though there is no portrayal of a Black gay man in Prince Faggot, from the first sex scene I immediately picked up on how the specter of the all-powerful and anxiety-inducing “BBC” framed the burgeoning relationship between Prince George/Performer 6 (John McCrea) and his subaltern “anti-imperial” lover, Dev/Performer 1. I’m not suggesting this was done intentionally, but that somehow makes it all the more terrifying. Instead, I suggest that the colonial/colonized conflict staged between Dev and George, and perhaps the United Kingdom and India, is stabilized by a common, unconscious antagonism towards the absent presence of an even darker entity. Indeed, even the pious Mohandas Gandhi was united with his British rulers in the presumption that Africans, imagined as sexually licentious, were not capable of governing themselves and thus did not belong to the global anti-colonial community. Prince Faggot possesses an unconscious etched from this broader anti-Black unconscious that it inherits, reproduces, and alludes to in flashing moments of sexual innuendo.

After the first, long-awaited sex scene, Dev asks “What would your granddad think of that?” as if fucking George was one of the decolonial methodologies he was learning in university. (If we look at the partners of similar students in real life, it seems the playwright might unfortunately be onto something.) In a moment Fanon would refer to as negrophilia, the often unacknowledged shadow of negrophobia, it is as if Dev attempts to cloak himself in the imagined prowess of the Black phallus. That is, the Brown Dev and white George engage in a kind of metaphysical race play animated by a shared hunger for the symbolic vitality projected onto the absently-present Black penis. For Dev, the imaginary Black phallus represents the possibility of anti-colonial conquest over a dead royal patriarch. For the Prince, the Black phallus simply represents a novel yet euphoric vehicle for imperial gratification. The subsequent dialogue between the two is framed by a strange dom/sub dynamic that the play fails to interrogate for its unspoken racial impetus.

With cum swiftly on the run, George asks Dev if he would ever bottom for him and Dev emphatically responds in the negative because of the shame it would bring his ancestors to be taking dick from the Prince rather than giving it. What is unsaid yet shouted is that any colonized person on the receiving end of this intimately restaged settler/native encounter colludes in a kind of sexual neo-colonialism. On the flip side, the top is somehow a revolutionary political actor, toppling colonial structures with each stroke of their melanated sword. Unfortunately, this mirrors logic I’ve heard from some of the Black men I’m in community with who have sex with either white bottoms or white women and have internalized this patriarchal logic. Somehow being on top negates the fact that they’re still relegated to the bottom of society, a fact confirmed in the colonial imagination of the white Euro-American subject at the very moment of penetration. I was disappointed—yet unsurprised—that the playwright squandered this moment ripe for a necessary dialogue in interracial queer circles. Dev might have been the top in bed, but George still held the crown, and with it, both Dev’s brown balls and the destiny of his homeland despite the anti-colonial thrust of his fleeting inhabitation of anti-Black phallocentricity.

My theory of the phantom BBC can be supported by lines later in the play like Dev’s quip at George, “I’ve seen you after a few negroni’s,” while sitting at dinner with George’s royally multiracial family, including his Black father and sister portrayed by Performers 2 and 4, respectively, and white mother portrayed by Performer 3 (Rachel Crowl). Dev’s teasing intended to expose the limits of George’s feigned chastity, particularly after consuming a few strong (and dark-colored) drinks. Yet after witnessing the earlier sex scene, Dev’s playful use of “negronis” pierced my ears like a dirty needle. His sonic delivery immediately conjured to mind “negros,” particularly the idea of a Black phallus, or three. Fanon would refer to this as a “failure” of the tongue that candidly reveals the underlying racial and sexual principle governing the imaginary world of Prince Faggot and, by extension, the colonized world to which it belongs. Again, this is not to imply this was a conscious choice on the part of Tannahill. Instead this failure represents a moment of catharsis in which the playwright’s unconscious momentarily untethered itself from the politically-correct mask of repression.

Through noting these breakthroughs, we can decypher the unseen mechanics of the play’s unconscious and the broader racial drama of colonialism, particularly as it relates to the disavowal of the darkfaggot, and how it informs the white gay experience. Another such failure occurs towards the play’s end. While crashing out on two tabs of acid about the pressures of conforming to royal expectations, George laments “I want to feel,” and helplessly reminisces about Dev and “his Black…his Black eyes” while wearing a leather sub uniform. As if anticipating Prince Faggot, Fanon prophetically writes that for the white subject desiring to possess and imbibe their darker parts, “the sexual potency of the Negro is hallucinating.” Again, these unconscious slips of the tongue alert us to the libidinal drama of slavery and colonialism, a tale of repressed desire as old as the crown itself, machinating behind the curtain of the world Tannahill builds. This world encircles and ensnares something dark and unseen, unseen because it is dark, as cannon fodder for George to intimately negotiate inheriting the phallic power of “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I wonder how many white men in the audience could not say they’ve done the same...

*****

Prince Faggot ultimately ends with Performer 4’s soft indictment of the crowd for our own inability to recognize we were looking at an actual princess all along. This moment reveals the incapacity to see her Black transfemme body as either majestic or royal, and it is structurally necessary to the internal logic of the play and, by extension, the external logic of white gay subjectivity. In the same way viewers likely did not acknowledge the concrete sidewalk or its houseless dwellers on their stroll to the theatre for fear of dampening their joviality, they could not acknowledge the dark and silenced ground upon which the self-gratifying fulfillment of their collective desires for something rac(e)y was settled. Conceding to the psychically necessary yet repressed existence of darkfaggotry would willingly rupture the metaphysical architecture securely fastening their collective being as princely faggots.

In her closing monologue, the only one written by the actor rather than Tannahill, Stewart shirked her role as a side character. She claimed a voice and offered us a fleeting memory of ki’ing with friends at the pier and being crowned for her talents. In contrast to Prince George and the royal family, Stewart asserts she had actually earned her title and acclaim from her peers. Her reward? The opportunity to entertain a crowd of tipsy, high-horsed faggots. Adjusting to the off-beat cadence their excited hands could muster, Stewart vogues and dips with a regality perhaps many didn’t deserve to witness. 

From servant to sister to servant again, finally this princess is granted the stage to be a spectacle all her own.