While creaming can occur in straight sex, creaming in the context of gay porn is when the bottom, the performer in the receptive position, produces a translucent, sometimes white, substance from their anus, a reaction to the pleasure they’re experiencing from the top, the insertive partner. “I never really knew what creaming was,” Blackstone said, “but I just knew that the tops would always say, ‘You creamy,’ and I would be like, ‘What the fuck is that?’” (He has a regular 9-to-5 job in public health advocating for HIV prevention and awareness.) But in his many years of experience, there’s one aspect of gay sex that, until he turned 25, remained a mystery: the act of creaming. May “A Strange Loop” run as long as “The Lion King.JD Blackstone, a 33-year-old amateur adult performer based in Atlanta, has been working as a porn star - on-again, off-again - for about a decade. Usher's tormentors take turns toward the beginning questioning the play's very purpose: “No one cares about a writer who is struggling to write/They'll say it's way too repetitious/And so overly ambitious.” Jackson does make one terrible mistake, though. Can writing her a hateful Tyler Perry-style gospel play that lays out how anti-queer ugliness can be - in which the chorus sings “AIDS is God's punishment” - soften her heart? Will anything lead to his self-acceptance? Stay tuned. His father is unreachable but his mother offers some hope. In one scene, an inner thought offers his critique of the script: “Listen, you need to make it be about slavery or police violence so the allies in your audience have something intersectional to hold onto.”īut it is homophobia, ultimately, that is the ultimate target of “A Strange Loop,” and Usher tries to go back to the beginning - his family - before the loop can close. Jackson’s sly wit is decidedly not politically correct, taking jabs at left and right. It's a musical that uses the n-wood, then apologizes for it and then continues using it, gently mocks #MeToo, harnesses internet jargon, portrays a deeply sad sex scene and is acutely profane. In one of the trippiest scenes, Usher is confronted by a group of ancestors angry with him - Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Whitney Houston and an actor representing the film “Twelve Years a Slave" carrying an Oscar. Tyler Perry gets a lot of ribbing for “simple-minded, hack buffoonery,” Scott Rudin gets called out for the first time from a Broadway stage and even the critics get poked ("Watch them write you off as lazy/Not to mention navel-gazy"). “The Lion King” is hardly alone as targets of some mischief. Jackson's sharp dialogue - “Snagging a man is like finding affordable housing in this town - there’s a long waitlist and the landlords discriminate” - is matched in his lyrics: “Why don’t you just ravage me/with your white gay Dan Savagery?” There are sly allusions to his influences, like “Exile in Gayville,” a riff on “Exile in Guyville” by Liz Phair, who incidentally wrote a song the musical has borrowed for its title. Jackson, who in real life was an usher at “The Lion King,” is also the songwriter, and he writes the 18 songs within the Broadway tradition, a lovely cocktail of rock and R&B, melded harmonies, ballads and belting.
Stephen Brackett's direction is crisp and carefully varied over 100 minutes and terrific choreography by Raja Feather Kelly combines everything from twerking to gospel swaying. He's battling a toxic stew of romantic rejection and artistic self-doubt, from shame for his secret love of white girl music to fears of being a race traitor.Īlong for the ride are six sensational actors who play the chorus: Antwayn Hopper, L Morgan Lee, John-Michael Lyles, James Jackson Jr., John-Andrew Morrison and Jason Veasey. Jaquel Spivey, in his Broadway debut, plays Usher with such hang-dog and sweet poignancy that it may take audience members supreme self-restraint not to go up on stage and give him a hug.