We’re in a small room up on the 43rd floor of a hotel just off New York’s Central Park. “I might pace, so don’t mind me,” says Tituss Burgess, dressed in a blue button-down shirt and a pink vest. And pace he does, barefoot, speaking expressively, using his hands as he walks back and forth across a large window, sometimes stopping to make eye contact.
Burgess is the breakout star of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Tina Fey’s comedy series about the survivor of a doomsday cult who heads for the bright lights of New York after spending 15 years in a bunker in Indiana. The relentlessly peppy Schmidt, played by Ellie Kemper, moves in with Titus Andromedon, a black, gay struggling actor who works as a giant robot in Times Square. He’s played by Burgess – who is also black and gay, though not struggling so much as an actor any more.
In the first series of the Netflix show, which returns this week, Burgess brings us two glorious moments that brilliantly, if uncomfortably, capture what it means to be a black, gay man in America today. The first comes when Andromedon, walking around New York dressed in a ridiculous werewolf costume, discovers that he is treated as less of a monster like this than when simply walking around as himself.
In the second, he writes a song called Peeno Noir, which he calls “an ode to black penis”. In the video, he flings off his workman’s overalls to reveal shiny gold leggings and a sequinned top. He then performs the rest of the number in various disguises – from a Roman emperor in a shiny purple toga to an angel in white feathers and top hat – while fooling around with a variety of props, including animal jawbones and large phallic corncobs.
On this evidence, you would not immediately guess that Burgess cut his teeth as a performer in church. “Church was everything,” he says, before quietly adding: “Eventually, church was the enemy.” Now 37, he was raised as a Baptist in Athens, Georgia, but found the Lord’s house a confusing place. “The first gay people that I knew – but it was unconfirmed – were musicians in the church,” he says. “Imagine how perplexed a young Tituss must have been seeing his ‘family’ – but hearing that his family doesn’t somehow belong. What must that do to anybody?”
It is not, however, something that Burgess – a music graduate from the University of Georgia – has turned his back on: he now sings in the Jerriese Johnson East Village Gospel Choir, which has backed Debbie Harry, appeared on The Today Show, and sung in support of everything from LGBTI causes to the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
Growing up, Burgess wasn’t really aware of any out black gay men in the media, until one day he came across the drag queen RuPaul on TV. “I didn’t know who she was,” he says. “While seeing a man in a woman’s outfit was strange, it did not confuse me. I thought: ‘OK!’” The word fills the room, delivered as it is in the sharp, ringing register of his character, which Kimmy Schmidt fans have grown to love. Fey created the role for him on the strength of his performance in 30 Rock, her satirical sitcom about a comedy sketch writer. It’s an achievement made all the more impressive by the fact that, at first, he only had a one-line role in 30 Rock, as a histrionic hairdresser called D’Fwan.
While Kimmy Schmidt was created by Fey and Robert Carlock, it’s the former Burgess has a special affection for. “Because we giggle like girls more than me and Robert would. She has her finger on the pulse of what’s going on in America, and is a lover of the gay community. She will always give me material that serves a greater purpose.”
Andromedon is no assimilationist gay. He’s a loud, proud, unabashed queen – and Burgess says he does find elements of himself in the character: “Outside of this show, I’ve always tried to show up, to not hide.” This hasn’t always been easy, he adds, “looking like what I look like”; in New York’s gay community, people often openly declare “no fats, no femmes, no blacks” in dating ads and on hookup apps. I ask how he felt when he discovered that he was going to be singing Peeno Noir. “I was horrified when I first read it,” he says. “I didn’t understand it. I just thought: ‘This is so random.’”
But, as they filmed the episode, “it became clearer for Tituss Burgess that Titus the character is enjoying being a black man and this ode to the black penis is sort of a self-deification”. We don’t usually see black men on TV enjoying being who they are, but Peeno Noir, he adds, was about “someone coming into their fullness – no different than Kim Kardashian doing all these Instagram selfies of her naked body, or Amber Rose showing her ass every chance she gets.” (If you, too, were horrified by Peeno Noir but couldn’t look away, expect more racial discomfort in season two, when viewers get to see Andromedon as a gay slave.)
Burgess, who also played Sebastian the Crab in the Little Mermaid musical on Broadway, has now joined a very small group of openly gay black actors who have appeared on screen as gay characters: in the 1960s, there was hustler and nightclub performer Jason Holliday in Portrait of Jason; in the 1980s, the poets and activists Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill appeared in Tongues Untied; and last year, Jack Waters starred in Jason and Shirley. It’s a position, Burgess believes, that brings a certain amount of responsibility.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “When I first got this job, none of those things were on my mind. It was only after it premiered and people began to talk about the cultural effect, the phenomenon, that I more closely examined what being on this show will mean for people.” He adds: “When my young sisters and brothers in my community come up to me, beaming, it makes waking up at four o’clock in the morning to go do this worth it.”
• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt returns to Netflix on 15 April. Season one is out on DVD now.
