Pose star Jeremy McClain explores queer parenting and family trauma in new Edinburgh Fringe show
In Rat Tails, Pose star Jeremy McClain explores how one question prompted him to look back at his family history. (Supplied)
When actor Jeremy McClain and his partner of 12 years began the first step to becoming queer parents in November 2021, a psychologist asked them a seemingly innocuous question: what kind of parents did they want to be?
“Initially I was just like: ‘I mean, a good one? Like, not a sh*t one,” McClain tells PinkNews. still bemused almost three years later.
In a moment, that query pulled everything McCLain had experienced in life into uncomfortable focus. The reality of what he was about to begin struck him like a lightning bolt. “That question was really the spark of me wanting to get to the bottom of my past,” the actor says.
Now, McClain has turned the experience into a one-man, one-hour play, Rat Tails, playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In it, McClain, best-known as Cubby Wintour in Ryan Murphy’s Emmy-winning queer drama Pose, plays Jasper, a man sitting in an NHS maternity ward, awaiting the arrival of his baby.
Rat Tails is fictionalised, but it’s very much based on McClain’s life. Jasper is an American married to an aristocratic British man, McClain is from the US and his husband is from Edinburgh, where they both live (although he’s certainly not an aristocrat).
Jasper is a model agent, McClain spent five years as a junior agent at Ford Models in New York. Jasper is “Prozac-popping”, McClain lives with anxiety and depression.
The actor stars in every role. “We have my mom, my grandpa, the husband – well, not mine, Jasper’s of course,” he says. “I mean, it’s a show about my life, really.”
The crux of the show is that Jasper is trying to unpack his family’s troubled past, just as he’s about to welcome its future. “It’s this fork in the road, and deciding whether he feels like [having a child] is the right move, because if he does, there could be repercussions,” McClain says.
When he was asked what kind of parent he wanted to be, he was left thinking whether he, too, would be bringing “intergenerational issues” into his child’s life.
He speaks candidly about his family’s history with severe mental health issues. When the star was just six – a time where he himself had a rat-tail hairstyle, hence the show’s title – his uncle took his own life in McClain’s mother’s apartment.
“He was my only uncle, my mom’s only other sibling. I was really tight with him. I loved him,” he says. A year later, his maternal grandfather took his own life, too.
Despite losing “two of the biggest male figures in my life,” it sounds as though McClain’s mother Laurie is the most prominent reason for wanting to tell this story. Hers is a remarkable story.
She lives with bipolar disorder, and has also attempted suicide. Earlier in life, she worked her way from the “very bottom” of the military, eventually becoming a lieutenant commander, and was a single mother to McClain. She lost family members and experienced abuse.
Then, on 11 September 2001, she was in the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into it as part of the 9/11 attacks. She was severely injured – 125 colleagues died.
“She got a really bad degenerative brain injury from it,” McClain reveals. “She was honestly fine for about a decade, then it took a really bad turn… she has seizures all the time, and she’ll forget who I am, [who] my dad is.”
Talking about her now, he sounds immensely proud. “She got this Navy award because she saved this man’s life. It’s a crazy story,” he says. In his eyes, she “worked her way up to support me and give me a better life than she had [or] anyone in our family ever had. Because of her struggles and sacrifices, I got to go to New York and live my dream, work in fashion, be on TV and marry my husband.”
Is Rat Tails, then, a love letter to Laurie and how she raised him? Not exactly, he says.
“I think the intersection of me starting a family and her health deterioration just crossed in this weird way that I couldn’t ignore, and really seeing that flip of child becoming parent and parent becoming the child.”
The play does have a sister project though, a documentary about Laurie’s life and their relationship.
Both the documentary and the play help McClain lay out his family traumas, and understand how they have shaped him. “I’m the first person in a new generation to not have these generational curses, but they still very much live within you,” he says.
Despite his own experiences with poor mental health, he is able to function better than others in his family tree. “I’m fully living my life and it’s really beautiful,” he says. But still, he wanted to put his background under the microscope and on the stage, so that “when my child does arrive, it’s like: ‘Look, your dad did the work to try [to] process these things’.”
Contrary to every direction the conversation suggests up to this point, Rat Tails is actually a comedy – to a degree. Jasper isn’t just experiencing the crisis of new parenthood, he’s experiencing it through the lens of a millennial gay man in 2024.
At his age, and with a baby on the way, can he call himself a twink any more? Has his queer credibility disappeared? “That’s another big question of the play… how does a traumatised queer person imagine their future?” But he probes the issue with references lifted directly from Gay Twitter. “It’s a very knowing show. It’s very online,” he promises.
Expect an abundance of references to the pleasures and perils of being a thoroughly modern gay man. “There’s PrEP and douching and Zendaya and twinks.”
He sees it is a positive show too, rather than simply a public exhibition of his difficult family history. At its heart, it’s about “the power of reinvention and transformation, and not letting your past affect your future,” he says.
As a queer person, the road to becoming a parent is often long. But McClain sees that as an opportunity to take his time, come to terms with what he’s been through, and “learn to embrace your past, the good parts, and learn that that doesn’t define you”.
Rat Tails will be performed at the Fruitmarket at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, at 5pm on 6-11 and 13-18 August. Tickets are available here.
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