This month, I’m saying goodbye to Titanique.
Even typing that feels insane.
For months, I have gotten to walk into the St. James Theatre eight times a week, put on a costume, be completely ridiculous, completely queer, completely over-the-top, and make a Broadway audience laugh. I have gotten to share a stage with some of my best friends. I have gotten to be part of this beautiful, unhinged little show that somehow found its way onto Broadway.
And I got to do all of it sober.
That last sentence means more to me than I can possibly explain.
I’ve talked very openly about recovery because secrecy has never really served me. I’m Frankie Grande. Subtlety was never exactly the brand.
But recovery this year has asked something different of me. It hasn’t just asked me not to use. It has asked me to look at why I wanted to escape in the first place. It has asked me to sit in discomfort instead of running from it. To feel the feelings. All the feelings. Unfortunately, there are so many.
And it has asked me to learn how to love the person I am when there is no substance, no applause, no Instagram post, no costume, no punchline, and no fabulous distraction between me and myself.
That is hard.
It is also fucking beautiful.
There is something especially profound about doing that work while performing on Broadway, because performers are literally trained to seek a reaction. We know immediately if the audience loves us. They laugh. They clap. They stand up. And when you’ve spent your life being rewarded for making other people happy, it can become very easy to confuse being loved with being applauded.
Recovery has been teaching me the difference.
And weirdly, Titanique has too.
Because underneath all the camp and Céline Dion and insanity, this show has given me a place where I have been allowed to be enormous. Loud. Feminine. Masculine. Stupid. Sexy. Emotional. Completely fucking gay.
There was a time in my life when some of those things felt like armor.
Now they feel like freedom.
I think that’s where queerness and recovery have become so deeply connected for me. For so many queer people, we learn very young how to edit ourselves. We figure out which version of us makes the room safest. Which version gets bullied less. Which version gets loved more. Some of us get so good at shape-shifting that eventually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
And then, if we’re lucky, we find queer community and discover this incredible truth: The things we were told to turn down are often the exact things worth celebrating.
Recovery has been another version of that discovery for me. It has been a process of stripping away the things I used to hide behind and asking: Who am I underneath all of this? And the answer, hilariously, is still very gay.
Thank God.
I am still loud. I still love glitter. I still want to make people laugh. I still want to sing at an inappropriate volume. I still want to walk into a room and bring the energy up twelve notches.
Recovery hasn’t made me less Frankie. It has made me more Frankie. That may be the greatest gift of this chapter of my life.
When Titanique closes, I know I’m going to cry. A lot. Like, somebody please Scotchgard the St. James Theatre.
But I also know that when I walk off that stage for the final time, I will be walking away with something I didn’t have when I began this journey: a deeper trust in myself.
I know now that I can experience joy without chemically manufacturing it. I can survive pain without numbing it. I can stand in front of an audience completely exposed and still be enough. I can have an extraordinary day and be present for every second of it. I can have a terrible day and know that it will pass.
Most importantly, I don’t have to escape my life anymore. I actually really fucking like my life.
National Recovery Month is complicated because recovery itself is complicated. It isn’t a before-and-after photo. It isn’t “I was broken, and now I’m fixed.” At least it hasn’t been for me. It is something I choose, over and over again. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes messily. Sometimes one minute at a time.
And I’m learning that there is enormous pride in that choice. Pride in being queer. Pride in being sober. Pride in being exactly who I am without apologizing, shrinking, hiding, or numbing.
So yes, I’m devastated to say goodbye to Titanique. But I’m also ready. Because this time, when the curtain comes down, I don’t need to run from what comes next. I get to be here for it.
Fully present. Fully sober. Fully alive.
And, obviously, fully Supergay.
See Frankie Grande in Titanique before its final Broadway performance at the St. James Theatre on Sunday, September 20.
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