Photograph by Brady Brown
“Joy is an act of resistance.”
Those words, written by Black feminist poet Toi Derricotte in her book The Undertaker’s Daughter provide a hopeful call to the oppressed. The idea they convey has gained new relevance for the LGBTQ+ community amid rising backlash against queer Americans, especially transgender adults and youth. Out Front Theatre, Atlanta’s queer-led performance company, has embraced its role in sustaining that joy. Its season-closing production, this month’s world premiere of Trick! The Musical, based on the 1999 film, trains the spotlight on the bright side of LGBTQ+ life.
“For too long, our community was relegated to stories of tragedy, of villainy,” says company founder and producing artistic director Paul Conroy. “This season, I just wanted to program stories that would lift everyone up, so they can go back out into the world and fight against those injustices.”
LGBTQ+ Americans have achieved remarkable gains in the past several decades, including the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage. But in recent years, this evolution has been met with rising hostility, fueled in part by some people’s discomfort with the increasing number of Americans, especially children, who identify as gender-nonconforming or transgender.
President Donald Trump has championed this backlash, rolling back protections for transgender students and federal employees and seeking to curtail access to gender-affirming healthcare. (Many of these orders have been blocked or are being considered in the courts.) Meanwhile, several states have introduced legislation to undermine or outright overturn the Obergefell decision.
Art created by and for queer people has taken hits as well. After President Trump installed himself as the new board chairman of the federally funded Kennedy Center, a scheduled concert featuring the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., was canceled. Trump had already expressed his disdain for LGBTQ-focused programming, posting on his Truth Social platform, “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP.”
Out Front Theatre, for its part, is facing this onslaught with queer joy because, as Conroy puts it, “Queer theater and queer art is political no matter what the environment is.”
This year’s season began with Hairspray, the smash-hit musical based on the film by John Waters. The season closer, Trick! The Musical, which opens May 1, is a rollicking romantic comedy about a thwarted one-night stand that turns into something more.
The brand-new musical originated in 2021, when Conroy was pondering Out Front’s next steps. After the 1999 movie Trick crossed his mind as an idea, he reached out to the film’s screenwriter, Jason Schafer. “‘I’ve loved your movie Trick for a couple of decades. I think it should be a musical,’” Conroy recalls writing to Schafer. “And here we are.”
Schafer, who coproduced the first season of the American version of Queer as Folk, had been approached before about adapting the film, but felt that Out Front Theatre’s mission made it the right collaborator. Schafer brought in Arthur Lafrentz Bacon, who took his lyrics and crafted 15 songs for the new musical.
“When Paul and I first started talking in 2021, we were not—or I wasn’t, at least—anticipating where the country would be now,” says Schafer. “And it feels like as dispiriting as these times can be for LGBTQ folks, it also—in some ways, sadly—feels like a really good time for this particular show and this particular story to come back.”
Joy, after all, should be infectious and relatable. “Queer joy can be anything, but it comes down to universal stories that anyone, queer or not, can identify with,” Conroy says. “So those center around themes of love and family and of acceptance. And,” he adds, “lots of humor.”
This article appears in our May 2025 issue.
