Broadway Producer Richie Jackson on His New Book Gay Like Me and Why the Battle for Gay Rights Isn't Over

When Richie Jackson set out to write his book Gay Like Me, he decided to construct it as a letter to his openly gay teenage son. “I wanted to share with him what it means to be a gay man,” Jackson, told Broadway.com’s Ryan Lee Gilbert, in a recent #LiveAtFive interview. The Tony-nominated producer of Torch Song (2018), Jackson is also the executive producer of Nurse Jackie on television and husband of Jujamcyn Theaters president Jordan Roth. 

Gay Like Me was published last month by HarperCollins, and while it’s addressed directly to Jackson’s son, it is also more broadly for young gay people who think the battle for equality has been fought and won. “When he was 15, my son told my husband and I that he was gay, and I was elated,” said Jackson. “But then he said, ‘Daddy, being gay is not a big deal. My generation doesn't think it's a big deal.’ And I thought, ‘Oh no, being gay is a really big deal.’ And I didn't want him to grow up to be one of these people who diminishes it and demeans it, and puts it in a corner of his life and says, ‘I just happen to be gay, gay doesn't define me.’ If he did that, he would break his own heart.”

That complacency—the false belief that any war is won and the tendency to forget one’s own history, an idea also examined this season with The Inheritance—is what propelled Jackson to write Gay Like Me. “All these rainbows and the hashtag, ‘love is love,’ and every piece of apparel that has rainbows on it—that's all a veneer hiding a very real war that's going on,” he explained. “And I wrote the book partly because I was afraid for my son as he left our home to be a gay man in America. Donald Trump and Mike Pence are more of an imminent threat to our son than ISIS and North Korea.”

The threat posed to people on the LGBTQ spectrum is real, says Jackson, and that young people need to be prepared to fight for their rights, just as the generation before them did. “There are 41 anti-LGBTQ hate groups in America. There are over 100 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures, 30 states in all,” said Jackson. “The Trump administration has argued in the Supreme Court that it's constitutional to fire someone for being gay. They've argued that a business can turn away a gay person, and they wanted medical professionals to be able to deny medical care to gay people citing religious objection.”

Jackson then talked about Harvey Fierstein Torch Song, which he helped bring to Broadway in 2018. The producer remembered how that show changed his life. His mother was the one who actually took him to see it for the first time when he was 17 years old, before he even came out. 

“The [main] character Arnold, was the first gay man I ever came in contact with,” said Jackson. “At the end of the play the mother says to the character Arnold, ‘If I knew you were gonna be gay, I wouldn't have had you.’ And my mother takes me to dinner afterwards and says, ‘If you ever came home and said you were gay, I would never react like the mother in that play.’ It was an incredible gesture.”

Now that he’s a parent, Jackson wants to offer similar guidance not just to his son, but to all young gay men and women—especially in a world where young people are still ostracized by their family and communities for coming out. “Our whole job, as older gay people, is to take care of younger gay people,” he said. “What we as a community have to do is take these young people, surround them with community, lift them up so they can find their gifts, and unleash their potential.”

Watch the rest of Jackson's #LiveAtFive interview below.