Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill

Since the early 2010s, Jordan Tannahill has emerged as one of the most provocative and adventurous queer voices in North America. A Canadian playwright, novelist, and director, Tannahill’s work consistently probes the intersections of sexuality, intimacy, and spectatorship, often asking audiences to confront how desire and authority circulate among bodies and institutions of power. Across his many novels, plays, and performance installations, he has built a body of work that occupies a distinctive position in today’s theatrical and literary landscape.

Tannahill is a two-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays (2014) and Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom (2018). His debut novel, Liminal, won France’s 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires, and his second novel, The Listeners, was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize. His work has been translated into twelve languages and presented at venues in Toronto, New York City, London, Avignon, Berlin, Vienna, and Montreal.

From 2008 to 2016, Tannahill wrote and directed plays through his Toronto-based theatre company Suburban Beast, staging work in theatres, art galleries, and found spaces, often collaborating with non-traditional performers such as night shift workers, frat boys, preteens, and employees of Toronto’s famed Honest Ed’s discount emporium. From 2012 to 2016, in collaboration with William Ellis, he ran the alternative art space Videofag in Kensington Market, an influential incubator for queer and avant-garde work in Toronto

Most recently, Tannahill’s play Prince Faggot—his first to have a major production in New York—premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons before transferring to Studio Seaview, running for seven months. Prince Faggot imagines a future in which a queer heir to the British monarchy becomes the object of public fantasy—and suspicion. Since its premiere, the play has sparked significant attention for its unflinching examination of queer sex, class dynamics, and the voyeuristic impulses of theatrical spectatorship and nudity. And, of course, there’s the title. Interrogating the perceived limits of queer visibility, Prince Faggot explores the cost of being made legible within systems of power that claim to celebrate difference while simultaneously erasing or consuming it.

At a moment when LGBTQ+ bodies are increasingly politicized, commodified, and legislated against, Tannahill’s work insists on the messiness of queer desire and the ethical stakes of looking. His writing resists narrative closure, foregrounding ambiguity and discomfort as central aesthetic strategies. In doing so, he challenges audiences to consider not only what we are watching but also why and how we watch.

This interview was conducted on Nov 3, 2025 via Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Benjamin Gillespie: Are you in New York now?

Jordan Tannahill: Yes, I’m in the East Village. I’ve been here for a little over a year. Before that I lived in London, and before that, Toronto.

BG: I’m also Canadian and have followed your work since I left Toronto more than a decade ago.

JT: It’s always exciting to meet people who know Canadian theatre.

BG: Do you miss Toronto?

JT: It really is a great city. I was very much shaped by the theatre community there, especially the spirit of collaboration and making work for friends. There was never really a sense of a mass or commercial audience. Instead, artists were pushed by their peers and pushed each other to keep going.

BG: I know what you mean. I was just in NYC last week to see Prince Faggot again at Studio Seaview. It’s such a beautiful play. Congratulations on another extension.

JT: Thank you so much—and thank you for coming back. I really appreciate it.

BG: I also just watched your MSNBC interview with Jeremy O. Harris.

JT: [Laughs] I can barely remember what I said on MSNBC. I was so nervous. My inner monologue was just relieved that Jeremy was talking. I still can’t bring myself to watch it.

BG: Prince Faggot opens with performers sharing childhood photographs and reflecting on queer childhood. Could you talk about how that image of Prince George became the seed for the play?

JT: A lot of my thinking around queer childhood comes from Jon Davies, a Canadian curator and writer. In 2012, he hosted an event called “Sissy Boy YouTube Night” at Videofag, a space I ran in Toronto with William Ellis. Jon was interested in the then-emerging genre of YouTube videos made by preteens and young adolescents filming themselves in their bedrooms, often lip-syncing to pop songs or engaging in private rituals of expression that were deeply queer-coded. Watching those videos alongside an adult queer audience was joyful because we recognized ourselves in these kids. Many of us had done similar things in private before YouTube existed. At the same time, I felt protective of these kids. Posting these videos was brave, and the responses ranged from hateful comments to extraordinary outpourings of love and community. It raised the question of how we talk about pre-sexual queer expression and give it language. Looking at childhood photos of ourselves, many of us had that moment of recognition: we were gay kids. I mean, so many of us have stories of dressing up in our mom’s clothes, or dancing to pop music like Aqua or Ace of Base, copying music video choreography, being fabulous in these very private rituals. Suddenly, those kinds of moments became public, and that shift felt both exhilarating and, for me as an adult gay man, slightly alarming. It triggered a kind of protective response as a gay man.

When I saw those photographs of Prince George online back around 2017, a lot of the above came to mind. Once again, it was a very public moment in which people experienced recognition and perhaps even self-identification through these images. For me, it raised questions such as: How do we give language to queer childhood? How do we talk about it in a way that is rooted in our own personal experiences of seeing ourselves reflected but that also has some kind of public utility?

Seeing those photographs of George produced a powerful moment of self-recognition for me, but it also prompted a kind of thought experiment. If the future heir to the British throne were to be gay, what does that mean for the monarchy as an institution, for the queer community at large, and, more importantly, for this individual child?

That question became a vehicle for me, and for this ensemble of performers, to interrogate our own relationships to power, colonization, and queerness, and to examine how these systems of oppression and histories of power play out on our bodies and our sexualities.

BG: We see that journey in the play as we move very quickly from that initial image to Prince George as an adult. Were you worried about pushback or controversy by representing the Royals in this way?

JT: Absolutely. The play is constantly walking a fine line. We are careful not to assign a sexuality to a real child. The Prince George we depict is entirely fictional and hypothetical, and in many ways a deeply autobiographical foil for me. Much of what happens to him in the play reflects my own experiences. One of the central provocations of the piece is this question: Can I dare to imagine that the future heir to the British throne might have a life that resembles my own, that he might encounter the same challenges I faced growing up as a gay man?

BG: And I think you posted about this on social media, right? You shared an image of yourself that was inspired by finding that photograph of Prince George. 

JT: Yeah, exactly. Mihir [Kumar]’s opening monologue at the top of the show is really me working through my reactions to that photograph through him. It’s a text I wrote for him specifically that encapsulates my own journey with that image and what ultimately grew out of it.

I wrote Prince Faggot in the early days of lockdown while I was living in London, and at the time my hope was that it would be produced there. That turned out to be very difficult. There was one theatre company that was genuinely excited about the play—they programmed it as their next production, and the artistic director was fully behind it—but once it moved up to the board and through legal review, it essentially stalled. They wanted me to change all the names, to fictionalize the Royal Family entirely.

I had to hold firm. The stakes of what the play is trying to do are fundamentally removed if the Royal Family becomes fictional. Once you’re in a made-up world, the political and historical weight disappears. It becomes meaningless, for example, for a trans woman to be Queen of England if that England no longer carries the histories of race, class, empire, and sexuality that define the real institution.

What matters is that someone like Rachel Crowl, a trans woman, is stepping into the role of Kate Middleton and embodying that figure within our actual world. That gesture allows the play to critique and dissect the lived differences between those experiences.

BG: It takes the teeth out of it if you remove that context. The stakes disappear.

JT: Exactly. The play has to exist in our world with all of its histories and political baggage intact. I became very resistant to what I felt was fear-based dramaturgy. I was talking with Jeremy O. Harris about it, and he said, “Send me the play.” He read it, loved it, and said, “Let’s do it in New York.” He saw those risks as attributes rather than liabilities, and that’s proven to be true. The play has really found its audience here, which has been incredibly affirming.

BG: I’ve also wondered how the reaction might differ in Canada or the UK as opposed to the US, whether the reception would shift in significant ways as it relates to the monarchy. This production hasn’t been entirely without controversy, of course, but it’s also been clearly embraced, given the extensions and the remount at Studio Seaview.

JT: Yeah, I think there are different cultures of sensitivity at play. The thresholds in Canada are different from those in the UK as well, and both are different from the US in that sense. New York really was the ideal city to introduce this piece to the world. Having it received here first helped set the tone for the broader discourse around the play.

BG: Did you revise the play much between Playwrights Horizons and the Studio Seaview run?

JT: Not significantly. There may have been small trims or wording changes but nothing substantial. We adjusted the staging for the new larger space at Seaview. That was it.

BG: How long did it take you to write the play initially? I know you were writing it back in 2020, but then it was a while before its premiere, so did you revisit it a number of times between then and now?

JT: The initial draft came fast, and then I spent years revisiting and revising it. Not full-time, of course, but returning to it again and again at different stages and between other projects.

BG: It’s like the Tennessee Williams impulse, to keep going back and rewriting plays, that desire to never quite let them settle.

JT: For me, though, most of the revisions happen before a play opens. Once it’s out in the world, I’m less inclined to return to it. At some point, the play becomes the play. If you revisit it years later, you’re really just writing a new work.

During the development of Prince Faggot, we had workshops supported by Jeremy and his company, BB². From the very first draft, the play had a metatheatrical framework: the ensemble stepped out, broke the fourth wall, and spoke as themselves. What shifted over time was how much space that material occupied within the overall runtime.

The play-within-a-play ultimately functions as a vehicle for the ensemble to articulate our relationships to power, colonization, and queerness. The monologues are fictional. I wrote them for these actors, but they are not their personal stories. I’m always reluctant to ask actors to perform that kind of emotional labor, to divulge intimate personal details for my work.

That’s the power of fiction and storytelling; they can sometimes get us closer to a truth. That said, the final monologue, performed by N’yomi Allure Stewart, is almost verbatim a story she shared in the rehearsal hall, drawn from a conversation the two of us had there. I removed my own voice from it and shaped her words into a monologue, but it remains her story. She is credited in the text as the author of those words.

It’s a singular moment in the piece where nonfiction punctures the fiction. That rupture feels important to me. It’s a very potent moment, one that allows the play to land on something grounded, lived, and undeniable.

BG: I love that. It’s such a beautiful connection, tying ballroom culture in New York to ideas of dynasty and the Royal Family.

JT: I think the question becomes: What would queer royalty actually look like? And the answer is that it already exists among us. We are our own royalty. It’s about reframing where power resides within our community. That power isn’t inherited; it’s earned. To paraphrase N’yomi, it’s measured by how you show up for your community, how you mother and father, how you care for others, and how you move through the world as a queer person.

When that idea emerged in the rehearsal hall, I remember thinking, “Okay, this is it, the dramaturgy is complete. This is how the show culminates.”

BG: It really is a beautiful ending, and it wraps up the piece in such a provocative way.

I also want to ask about casting. You’ve mentioned the ensemble and the work that developed through those workshops, but the casting itself feels crucial. You have trans actors, queer actors of color, and a wide age range onstage. The representation spans a broad spectrum. Was that an intentional choice from the beginning?

JT: The profiles of the ensemble were really baked into the text from the very beginning. There was always a desire to work with an intergenerational, diverse group of queer and trans performers. The idea was that they would both imagine themselves into positions of power they don’t occupy and, at the same time, explore how that power reflects back onto their own lives.

Some of the monologues actually emerged quite late in the process. David Greenspan, for example, didn’t have a monologue until about a week before tech. Jeremy and Adam Greenfield, the artistic director at Playwrights Horizons, kept pushing me, saying, “He really does need a monologue.” John McCrea, as Prince George, maybe doesn’t need one in the same way, but the rest of the ensemble really did.

BG: I agree. It was a memorable monologue, and it makes sense dramaturgically too.

JT: At first, I understood the dramaturgical logic of adding the monologue, but I couldn’t quite see where it would land or how it wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the piece. Then it finally clicked. It felt essential to bring an intergenerational perspective on AIDS into the play. The absence of AIDS, particularly in relation to the older cast members, had started to feel conspicuous, especially given how central sex and sexual liberation were to our conversations in the room.

David had brought this up a few times in relation to his own long-term relationship with his partner, and there was also a story that had been lodged in the back of my mind for years about how lesbians taught gay men how to fist, holding fisting workshops in bars and bathhouses in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. That story always struck me as such a beautiful example of queer kinship, resource sharing, and pleasure as a survival strategy. I had always wanted to write about it.

Once I recalled that, it became very clear that this was what David’s monologue needed to be about. It also helps resolve the journey the play takes through fetish. For audience members who don’t have a relationship to fetish, or whose only frame of reference might be shock or titillation, the monologue grounds those moments in a personal, political, and historical context. That grounding helps give the fetish scenes greater emotional stakes.

BG: That makes sense. I didn’t experience it as having shock value. It felt fully integrated into the narrative and dramaturgy, especially in what the play is saying about queer culture and queer shame. I also love the scene with the ghosts, when they all appear for Prince George like in Shakespeare’s Richard III. It’s such a powerful image. There are so many striking images in the show, but that one really stuck with me.

JT: The show is very much about overcoming queer shame. That’s been a central journey in my own life, really over decades, but especially during the period when I was working on the play. That half-decade leading up to it was a time of reckoning for me in that regard. I was definitely feeling my Caryl Churchill oats in that scene, but it’s also one of the moments that comes closest to autobiography or, maybe more accurately, self-portraiture. There’s that image of Prince George being hooded with my actual latex pup hood. It’s a hood that I’ve worn to raves over many years. That moment felt like a very direct way of placing my own body, history, and desire inside the work.

BG: Your hood is the actual prop used in the show?

JT: Yes, I was very specific about that. It couldn’t be just any hood—it had to be that exact one from this particular store in Berlin called Blackstyle, which doesn’t even make it anymore. For the few people who know me personally, it’s a hood I’ve worn a lot and been photographed in, so it carries personal significance for me.

For me, it embodies this transformative state of abandon that Prince George is reaching for but can never fully attain because of the strictures he lives under. It’s a state I’ve pursued in my own life as well as a sense of freedom and liberation, both sexual and spiritual. But it can also be self-obliterating. In the effort to remake oneself, that pursuit can involve a great deal of destruction.

I was writing the play during lockdown, at a time when I had no income from my art because everything was shut down. I was working primarily as a fetish sex worker, focusing on BDSM and extended role play scenarios. Writing the play felt like a personal charge to myself that my lived experiences couldn’t be more radical or interesting than the art I was making. I needed to bring something to the stage that approached what I was actually living at that moment. That’s what I hope audiences, and especially queer audiences, can connect to in the work.

BG: You’re really giving something of yourself to the work, and that comes through.

JT: Yeah, totally. The struggle with identity that interested me here was one that moves beyond the familiar question of “Am I gay or am I not?” or “Will my parents accept me?” I wanted to push past those more traditional coming out narratives. The coming out struggle still matters. There’s real value in articulating that experience for people for whom it remains urgent. But for me, that hasn’t been the central question for a long time. As a gay man, I’ve had the privilege of spending many years where that wasn’t the primary site of struggle.

A more active struggle for me now is trying to navigate the pull between a normative life and one oriented toward radical freedom. That includes grappling with pleasure, desire, and sometimes more difficult terrain like chemsex or dependencies. Those tensions feel much closer to my lived reality than the binary of disclosure or acceptance.

BG: So many narratives frame coming out as this moment of transformation or liberation. But often that transformation isn’t really for the person coming out. It’s for others. It functions as a kind of confessional moment, in the Foucauldian sense, where society pressures you to declare yourself.

Rather than freeing you, it can actually pull you more deeply into systems of regulation and expectation. Althusser’s idea of hailing comes to mind—it’s less a moment of emancipation than one of being interpellated into a structure that already exists. Coming out is often celebrated as empowerment, but it’s also—

JT: —not real.

BG: Exactly. It’s not that for a lot of people; it’s sort of forced.

JT: Speaking purely from my own experience, I came out as a teenager, and I was embraced fairly quickly by my family and community. That initial coming out wasn’t the primary rupture for me. But there’s a different journey that follows learning what it means to be sexual for the first time, to have a sexuality at all.

For me, there was a second awakening later, a kind of reckoning that arrived in my late twenties, when I realized just how expansive my sexuality actually was. It opened onto dimensions I hadn’t previously imagined—spiritual, narrative, even economic. It involved fetish, the transformative power of sex, and an engagement with the abject. It radically altered how I understood my body and what it could do.

That period was marked by expansion, by raving, experimenting with drugs, having sex in different ways and with different kinds of people. It felt like an extraordinary widening of possibility. That second awakening, rather than the initial coming out, is what I was really trying to capture in this play.

I wasn’t especially interested in making a work about that initial moment of coming out. I wanted to write something for the adults in the room, for people who have gone through, or are still reckoning with, that second awakening within their sexuality. For me, that reckoning has less to do with shame itself and more to do with shedding expectations imposed by family, by culture, by ideas of what a “healthy” sexuality or a “healthy” life is supposed to look like.

BG: And the repressive force of heteronormativity shows up in the play too, especially in the double standards around queer and straight childhoods. There’s this refusal to sexualize the photograph of Prince George, but, at the same time, children are constantly subjected to forced heterosexual narratives. Buying a baby a “Lady Killer” onesie isn’t seen as troubling, but queerness is immediately framed as inappropriate or suspect.

JT: Exactly. That double standard is very much one of the discourses the play engages with. Rather than shying away from it, the choice was to lean into it and name it directly. At this particular moment in American politics, queer and trans people talking about childhood feels charged and loaded. Instead of retreating into respectability politics, the play insists on confronting that discomfort head on and saying, “Let’s actually talk about it.”

BG: Absolutely. That opening really sets the terms for the audience in a beautiful way.

I wanted to ask you about the title of the play, because it’s obviously drawn a lot of attention. When I saw the production at Studio Seaview, I was standing outside waiting for a friend and watching people walk by the marquee billboard. Some of them almost refused to read it. One person started to read it out loud, saying “Prince Fay-go,” like pseudo-French or something—like he didn’t want to believe that was actually the word he was reading. I also noticed a lot of people referring to it as Prince F in the media as well. I’m curious about the tension around the title and the reactions you’ve seen to what’s often treated as a controversial term.

JT: Totally. The play was always called Prince Faggot, from the very first moment I opened the Word document to write it. It just felt inevitable. The title captures the two seemingly incompatible identities at the center of the play, and the friction between them is really the engine of the piece.

I knew the title had a certain brazen quality, and I hoped that would ultimately work in the play’s favor. What’s been interesting is that many people are surprised by the degree of nuance and humanity in the work, especially if they come in expecting something designed purely for provocation or shock. It’s definitely not a broad satire, which I think some people assume based on the title or what they’ve heard about it.

BG: And the people with the strongest negative reactions are probably the ones who haven’t actually seen it. I love that “Prince Faggot” is emblazoned in ten-foot letters at 43rd and 8th. For all the Port Authority commuters. Brilliant. 

JT: That billboard still amazes me. Jeremy and I genuinely didn’t know whether we’d even be able to print the title on a marquee, or whether publications like The New Yorker or The New York Times would print it. Jeremy actually went back and researched every instance where the Times had used the word, most famously in relation to Larry Kramer, but also in other contexts. There was even a play in 1973 by Al Carmines called The Faggot, unrelated to Kramer’s book, that ran off-off Broadway and was reviewed in the Times. He pulled a review of it as proof that there was precedent. What interests me is that the audience’s relationship to the work begins before they ever see the play. It starts with how they talk about it with friends and colleagues.

Many of my straight colleagues, including agents, default to calling it “Prince F” out of respect, which I don’t mind. I’m honestly not sure I have a firm preference. Context matters, obviously. I don’t personally flinch when straight people use the word in reference to the title, but that’s not universally true.

In a way, the title is the first provocation you encounter. I’m really interested in artists like Julius Eastman, whose compositions had deliberately provocative titles using slurs. Who chooses to say those titles, and who doesn’t, becomes part of the work itself. That relationship changes over time. People may have felt more comfortable saying those titles in the 1970s than they do now. That evolution is interesting to me.

And honestly, it feels like a testament to New York City that, in this moment, we can have a giant marquee that says Prince Faggot. It’s right across from Chick-fil-A, which feels like a perfect showdown. It’s drama.

Also, a lot of queer people have complicated relationships with saying the F word. Even within the cast, there are generational differences. Some of the older gay actors identify strongly as gay men rather than queer, and they fought hard for that word. For them, faggot hasn’t been reclaimed and still carries a lot of pain. So, the title participates in a politics of reclamation, but not one that’s universally shared. That tension, across generations, is very real.

BG: Like any good play, it provokes.

My last question is about influence. When I was watching the play, I kept thinking about Jean Genet, especially his play The Balcony. I’m curious whether there were specific playwrights or works shaping this piece. You mentioned Caryl Churchill earlier.

JT: Definitely Caryl Churchill and Tony Kushner. And yes, Genet has been a huge influence on me. Structurally, one of the most important touchstones while I was writing was Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon. The way that play relates to the audience, how it explodes its own frame, how scenography becomes part of the dramaturgy—all of that had a major impact on me.

That was also true for our director, Shayok Misha Chowdhury. We talked a lot about An Octoroon in the early stages of development. It’s funny: years after I wrote the first draft, the play ended up being produced by Soho Rep where An Octoroon premiered. That connection feels less like coincidence and more like destiny.

BG: That lineage really makes sense to me. I hadn’t thought about the connection to An Octoroon.

JT: It’s in the DNA of the piece. In that sense, it all feels very fortuitous.

BG: Thank you, Jordan.