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.