Yahoo Sports Tituss Burgess Says 'Sex and the City' Helped 'Generate a Conversation That Was Long Overdue' About LGBTQ+ Community
"My community has always been the center of fashion, the center of forward-thinking," the 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' star exclusively told PEOPLE
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For the 25th anniversary of Sex and the City’s premiere, PEOPLE spoke with female and LGBTQ+ actors, directors and writers about how the show affected them, impacted the industry and continues to influence pop culture. These are their firsthand accounts.
Tituss Burgess, 44, Broadway actor and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star
There were three things that shaped my perception of New York City: Stephen Sondheim, the musical Rent and Sex and the City. I wanted to be Samantha Jones. I wanted her brazen confidence. She just didn't give a f--- and that's something I think I've learned to do now but I didn't always have that.
It completely galvanized how we all saw ourselves and what was possible. The big three is the perfect apartment, the perfect job and the perfect relationship. I've not had all three of them at the same time yet so I'm still searching for it. You're always searching.
Sarah Jessica Parker, in season 1, would break the fourth wall and I hated it. And then it just stopped. It was just a voiceover, an inner monologue, her writing up her column. I found that to be a much more realistic way of how we would deal with New York, to hear our passing thoughts, and to type it up in editorial form. She was walking fashion, obviously. She was living, breathing performance art and I think she captured what New York has always been and what we hope New York to always be.
I was probably too young to understand why it was necessary to show sex in such a realistic way. It wasn't until I got a little older and began to revisit the series and the things that shocked me no longer shocked me because every scenario and every depiction of human interaction was so horribly accurate. I think, perhaps, what was so shocking is that I realized that more people than just me experienced it.
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We [in the LGBTQ+ community] all loved and saw ourselves in those four women more than I loved or thought that I saw myself in the LGBTQ+ characters. While it helps start or generate a conversation that was long overdue about what our place is in New York and the culture in the world at large, the truth is my community has always been the center of fashion, the center of forward-thinking. We are the epicenter of it, so the story was actually told in the inverse. We should have been the stars and all four of those women would've been our sidekicks!
It made it more palatable for mainstream audiences and would-be audiences that would dismiss us. Seeing a figure perhaps that you've never seen before, that you may happen upon in real life, suddenly, you may know how to integrate them into your everyday vocabulary, into your world.
Sex and the City got their foursome idea from Golden Girls, and so did Designing Women. There have been four shades or four hues of women that sort of make up one mind that we often try to imitate. This concept of a rat pack of misfits trying to center themselves and make themselves whole enough, we're always chasing that construct and that way of storytelling. It was certainly responsible for furthering that style of storytelling, that construct and the lenses that we saw that show through. And they made New York City a star all over again. The show's legacy is a sense that no matter where we are, we will always be searching but no matter where we are, we can also be found.
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Sex and the City can be streamed in full on Max.
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