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why the lin-manuel miranda love fest must end, a comprehensive master post

“but jgt why don’t you like lin! stop hating on lin! he didn’t do anything!”

to be honest, i think a more accurate statement would be “i don’t like the miranda empire”. because the fact of the matter is that lin grew into the person he is today because he grew into a carbon copy of his dad. is this an excuse for anything he’s done? nope. but it is a reason, so let’s start there.

luis miranda, lin’s father

luis got his start in the world he orbits in by working as a special advisor to mayor ed koch of new york city in the 1980s. he did well in the role, so much so that koch appointed him to the board of the nyc health and hospitals corporation in 1989 when his term as mayor ended. but jgt, why does this matter?

it matters in the very general sense because ed koch completely bungled the AIDS epidemic the 1980s- and not because he didn’t know what he was doing- but because he was deeply closeted himself and projected that self hatred into homophobia. countless people died because of inaction. and when koch himself died the sentiment from the gay community, including prolific AIDS activist larry krammer was very “ding dong the witch is dead”. when larry kramer passed last year, luis did not post anything about his passing unlike lin and the majority of the city of new york. koch spent his years as mayor at total odds with the gay community, and that seems to have bled over to luis- but take that as you will.

even outside of the AIDS crisis, koch’s last term was marked by corruption scandal after corruption scandal.

which i mention to lead into luis’ corruption scandals related to the hispanic federation and his consulting firm, the MirRam Group. if you want to read the full article from 2014 about it you can do that here, but in short summary:

in 2014, the new york city city council gave 1.3 million dollars to the hispanic federation, and because of how closely tied the hispanic federation was to the MirRam group, a political lobbying group whereas the hispanic federation was non-profit, people took issue with this. the article above goes onto criticize luis in a very general sense, and below is the part that stood out the most to me.

“While, in current accounts of the Hispanic Federation, Luis Miranda is described as its founder, he was not but was its first President. It is important to note, as well that his appointment was quite controversial. It turned out that he was placed in this position through the direct intervention of then NYC Mayor Ed Koch. Miranda had served as Koch's Hispanic Advisor, a position that brought him much criticism from the Puerto Rican community that found Koch's neoconservative policies antithetical to its interests. With the election of Rudolf Giuliani as NYC Mayor in 1983, Miranda once again made a connection with a mayor who was very unpopular with the Latino community. Despite the objections of many, while president of the Hispanic Federation he agreed in 1993 to also serve as Chair of Giuliani's Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC). He eventually resigned from that position in 1995 when Giuliani's support of Medicaid cuts put Miranda and the Hispanic Federation in a politically awkward position. Instead of fighting the cuts and defying Giuliani, Miranda was criticized for simply walking away to avoid taking a position. The association with Miranda and his MirRam Group has had a negative impact on the Hispanic Federation's image. For example, Miranda was a paid consultant to the Nielsen company that measures the audiences of television stations. There was a major controversy over whether their "people meter" methodology was continuing seriously to undercount Latinos and Black audiences, with Miranda hired by them to counter these charges. Miranda in this case took on a client whose practices were undermining Latino interests. Last October, Miranda got the Hispanic Federation to co-sponsor with Nielsen what amounted to a self-serving marketing report on Latinos, which I criticized as inappropriate for the Federation as a social service organization who should be looking into community needs rather than corporate interests on how best to exploit Latinos as consumers."

luis has yet to share or say anything himself about governor andrew cuomo’s sexual assault allegations and the calls for him to resign, nor did he say or share anything regarding the exposing of scott rudin.

this is admittedly wading into speculation waters, but i fully believe that the cut character of lincoln rosario from in the heights was a character that lin based off of himself- including the issues lincoln had with his father. you can listen to his song ‘i’m out’ here. lin said in the siempre luis doc that he would got into screaming matches with his dad when he worked for him because he cared about music and not the things his dad cared about...which is kinda lincoln’s whole deal. again- it’s speculation, but take it as you will.

currently, luis is a bankrolled member of lin’s management team and makes money off of him and the hamilton empire.

luis was also a big player in the PROMESA debacle, but more on that later. onto lin.

lin-manuel miranda, untouchable golden child and infallible asshole

lin has, like his father, not shared anything in regards to gov cuomo or scott rudin. and yes- he is not required to. i know that. but he has a massive platform and people listen to him. his silence about both of those abusive men is strange when he has so much power to sway the general public and the theatre industry about them.

i know that anyone reading this has probably read the twitter thread that blew up in july, which you can find here, so i don’t want to be super redundant. information about the n-word situation and the debacle over lin blocking people who asked him to speak out about a sexual predator in the west side story revival can be found there. but fwiw, lin has not publicly acknowledged either of those things.

in the interest of focusing on things not discussed every other week on twitter let’s start with the drama surrounding the union negotiations.

the obc union negotiations- and why they matter.

you can find the investigative news article about them here.

to be very very brief- when the obc was fighting for profit sharing, aka continuing to earn money off of hamilton ticket sales even after they left the show, in 2015 lin was a dick.

jeffery seller try to bribe the cast into not pursuing it, cast members have literal breakdowns over this, and lin just kinda vibed idly by. he later said he 'knew' that jeffery seller had “the best intentions” which would be funny if it wasn’t so cruel to the cast members who told bloomberg news that they went home crying over the shit he pulled.

lin more or less pretended he did not see the union negotiations or the jeffery seller stuff, until the cast being understandably upset made him worry about infighting creating bad press. he told javi to get a handle on it, and javi in response stepped down as union negotiations lead telling the cast he wasn't going to do anything that "went against" lin. renee took his place.

the second time lin meddled in the union negotiations was when the idea was floated by the cast of boycotting the ham4hams until their negotiations were done. lin did not like this, and sent an email saying, to quote a transcript provided to bloomberg news “please please please, this is a ridiculously good platform to do a thing and have the internet talk about it all day.” the stage manager who helped run ham4hams sent an even harsher email, telling them to “leave it at the door”.

the ham4ham they ended up performing that week was the 10 duel commandments one that included the entire company. and this is MY personal speculation so don’t read this as verified info, but it does not sit right with me that the ham4ham they were made to do after being talked out of boycotting included the entire cast- esp when ham4hams that big were so rare. it feels like a decision that was made maliciously, but that's just my personal hot take.

according to an unnamed cast member, lin said at an october 2015 company meeting that "he supported the actors but wasn’t inclined to join their fight since he hadn’t been looped into it earlier."

which was massive load of BS because he could have done literally anything from the jump but chose to only participate by telling the cast infighting would be bad press and pressuring them into doing the ham4hams.

in the end the cast won and they got the profit sharing pool they wanted! which lin promptly joined, in spite of the fact that he did not support their fight for it and didn't need it seeing as he was already making money no matter what as a writer and producer of hamilton.

the unraveling of a dream article- and why that matters to lin

in early march of this year, former hamilton tour cast member daniel james belnavis published an article titled ‘the unraveling of a dream’ detailing his experience in hamilton, which he described as an abusive relationship.

while yes- this article is about his experience as a tour member, lin is named twice in the article. below are the excerpts that mention him.

“Hamilton is, without question, a Boys’ Club rooted in toxic masculinity and heteronormativity which is derived from its four creators: Lin Manuel Miranda, Tommy Kail, Andy Blankenbeuhler, and Alex Lacamoire — all of whom are straight cis-gendered men with either white or light-skinned privilege. In my experience, they facilitated a heterosexist work environment that made “some persons comfortable or powerful” while “providing supports, assets, approvals, and rewards to those who live and expect to live in heterosexual pairs”.⁴ The creative team gravitated towards and showed genuine interest in straight male cast members and lavished, in my opinion, inappropriate attention upon female cast members while I got a lot of “hey buddy”s or “hey man”s in passing.”

“Even more, triggering was the realization that Lin Manuel Miranda was one of the many prominent BIPOC names listed as a co-sponsor of We See You WAT, which effectively meant that Hamilton was one as well. I found it disconcerting that he would lend his name to such a powerful anti-racism proclamation when he and his work have facilitated an environment in which the very behaviors detailed in the initiative’s statement can flourish. I saw this for what it was: a performance. A capitalistic way to affiliate Hamilton with a prominent social action initiative in the wake of the show’s notoriously tardy response to the murder of George Floyd.⁸”

lin has not, in any form made a public acknowledgement of this article or the accusations. he tweeted a bunch of stuff about in the heights around the time of the article’s release with his -LMM signoff, only for his management to tweet about the stop asian hate stuff and bystander intervention training for him. the tweet got a good number of responses linking the article and calling him out for tweeting about his movie himself but not racism, almost like he was scared of being called a hypocrite. this happened on march 18th, and he then stuck to only RTing info about new developments (which included the ITH release date getting moved up and the atlanta shooting) instead of tweeting anything himself, or through his management, until march 30th.

speculation, i again clarify, but to me this felt like hiding behind retweets so he wouldn’t get a flood of responses about the article again. it felt weirdly out of character for him to not tweet anything himself about the announcement that in the heights was being released early and the horrific atlanta shooting. but that’s just my take.

daniel’s article caused a few weeks of numerous former hamilton cast members speaking out about their own negative experiences in the show, and insinuating that there are a lot of stories that would bring hamilton crumbling down if they were released. lin was, granted, only mentioned sporadically in this chatter- but he was mentioned, specifically in regards to how he was more or less ignoring everything.

this is a personal quip, but the part of daniel’s article that made my eyes bug out was the suggestion that the hamilton creative team gave inappropriate attention to women. TO BE EXTREMELY CLEAR, i am not aware of any accusations of this nature against lin and am not bringing this up to start rumors that currently do not exist.

but to me- an accusation like that against literally anyone isn’t something that can be ignored, especially in the age of #metoo. it does not sit right with me that lin completely ignored both the article and the other cast members speaking out that followed it, and given how they talked throughout those few weeks- i am hard pressed to believe he acknowledged it privately.

before you come into my anons telling me in spite of that you don’t think it has anything to do with lin, i invite you to remember that one of the former hamilton cast members that shared daniel’s article and publicly supported and encouraged the cast members speaking out, including the ones that named lin, was karen olivo. karen olivo- at one point even if not anymore- was extremely close to lin and will kinda always be tied to him because she was the vanessa to his usnavi. do you really think she would share an article that named him as toxic if she thought it was a baseless accusation?

lin was not among the theatre people who issued public support of karen announcing they wouldn't be returning to moulin rouge in protest of the toxicity of the theatre industry.

hamitlon PR, PROMESA, the apology, and the documentary that contradicted it

this post is already over 2000 words so will spare y’all a full write up of the promesa and hamitlon PR debacle. you can read a full summary of it here.

in short: lin and his dad leveraged the power they held to lobby for the PROMESA bill, which did a good deal of damage to puerto rico under the guise of helping. because of this, in 2017 when he announced he was bringing hamilton to PR, he was met with backlash and protests. while there were protests directed at him, there was a teachers union strike protest going on at the same time. this resulted in hamilton PR getting moved from the university of PR to another location. but if you’re thinking “okay then he listened to the protestors, that’s good!” i regret to inform you that the move was framed as happening because safety concerns, the university students were negatively blamed for the move and the protesters were not in any way supported by lin or his father.

in the interest of full clarity i will link the apology he issued for his support of PROMESA here

but that was 2017, last year the siempre luis documentary came out and in my opinion, completely walked back the apology.

in the documentary both lin and his father frame the protestors who expressed public disdain for the actions with PROMESA as the villains of the story. they framed people protesting lin speaking at an event as though it was a threat to his him, and had a big segment showing him being rushed off of the stage and luis yelling at them that they needed to let lin talk. and yes, docu film crews and editing teams make things dramatic on purpose. but as someone who has had things made about me, i can tell you that given that this was such a personal project- lin and luis had a huge amount of control and if they didn’t want the editors to demonize the protestors they would’ve stopped it- and they didn’t.

lin apologized for the PROMESA debacle because he was sorry he got in hot water for it, not because he was sorry he supported it.

and no “xyz famous person did it too” is not an excuse so don’t come in my anons box with that thanks. all of them were wrong to support it, but this is a broadway and theatre industry blog.

side notes

i wanted this master post to be mostly about documented factual incidents of lin’s bad behavior, but if you have followed me for a while or decide to take a scroll through my blog you know that among the topics that have been discussed here are concerns about lin not having a good sense of physical boundaries, the hierarchy/cliquishness that existed within the RR during the original run, and just general anecdotes about him coming off as a jerk. take all of those as you will- this is a snark and gossip blog and while i have a few ground rules, this is a place for people to air out their personal opinions and it will remain that way.

while i did make this post in the interest of not getting the same 50 “why do you hate my sweet baby lin” anons every week, my anons box is open for a reason and run your mouth in there as you please- whether it’s to ask questions or vent. i was a hardcore lin stan for the better part of four years and becoming disillusioned with him over the past year was unlike you might think- not a fun thing for me. don’t put your faves on pedestals y’all. it’ll save you a lot of grief.

best,

jgt (:

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