taylor trensch shamelessly rpf shipping on the main is soooo good. live your truth king
“rpf is fine” — taylor trensch
what’s really wild to me, though, is which members of the cast and creative team have or haven’t said anything about [The Truth Come Out: Does Floyd Collins Is Gay?], because after weeks of reading + watching + listening to as many interviews as possible, we’ve got:
taylor trensch: calling the show “kind of Brokeback Mountain” because of “a kiss that you’ll just have to come and see,” totally unprompted; responding to a question about the “electric homoeroticism between Floyd and Skeets” by citing the bit of Trapped! about floyd never being married or taking interest in women and possibly being gay and saying “some elements of that must have subtly crept into the show” but that he didn’t think it was “intentional on Tina or Adam’s part” (relatively restrained compared to the brokeback mountain comment, but wild on its own)
jeremy jordan: reminding us over and over that floyd’s in his 30s and has never been in a relationship and never really had a girlfriend and realizes that he’s missed out on a kind of personal connection he never looked for before, once even saying that “there’s a little bit of a question mark” in whether floyd would seek relationships “with the ladies… or otherwise,” again totally unprompted
ted sperling, music director of the 1996 and 2025 productions: commenting in a 2021 cast & creative reunion that doing the original run at the peak of the AIDS crisis meant there was a certain resonance in a story about “losing a young man in the prime of life”
martin moran, who played skeets in 1996: also in that 2021 reunion reflecting on doing the original run during the AIDS crisis, as well as cracking a joke about “crawling down a hole on top of Chris Innvar [the 1996 Floyd], which was a pleasure in and of itself,” very much like taylor trensch commenting re: working with jeremy jordan that “I get to lay on top of him and give him a little smooch! I’ve had a worse Tuesday night!”
note that 1) basically all of this is about floyd’s sexuality, while largely avoiding talking about skeets, and 2) tina landau and adam guettel have had nothing to say about this in all the interviews i’ve come across, which checks out with taylor saying he didn’t think it was intentional on either of their parts. i can believe it for adam, who didn’t write much material for skeets anyway (and is straight, as far as i can tell.)
but tina? a whole gay woman?? who wrote the libretto and created the sequence of “skeets is exhausted after hours of trying and failing to free floyd and floyd tells him to go up and rest but asks him for a kiss goodbye first, which skeets gives him, and promises to see skeets in heaven, and skeets just barely escapes before a cave-in cuts him off from floyd forever” by cutting & pasting together four separate historical moments, half of which didn’t even involve skeets in real life??? who directed the 1996 and 2025 productions and decided for the latter that floyd’s dreamed reunion with family and friends and rescuers should include skeets running to floyd and leaping into his arms and floyd spinning him around??? if she wasn’t skoyding it then what was she doing????
