“Above all, I fought the fuck back.” It was Feb. 2, 2019, and Jussie Smollett, the most talked-about celebrity of the moment, was performing at a sold-out show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Days earlier, the young, Black, queer star of Empire had told police he’d been assaulted on the streets of Chicago; in the coming weeks, it would emerge that he had planned the attack himself. But that night, talking to a cheering crowd, Smollett finally had a spotlight on his music and the world stage.
Smollett pauses, waits for the crowd to silence before he makes his next remark, emphatically but with a chuckle: “I’m the gay Tupac.”
I remember watching the clip as it began to go viral, as people began questioning his story, and being taken slightly aback. Who says something like that? What point was he trying to make?
“I’m not fully healed yet, but I’m going to be,…
