Stage musicals have always been quite queer, but only in the last few decades have they been explicitly so. Few are credited for this visibility on the Broadway stage like Rent, an enduringly modern hip-pop opera that debuted in the post-AIDS early '90s. A 2005 film version further popularized the show, but Fox's live production of Rent, which aired last night, will surely introduce an entirely new generation to a story in which AIDS is a major plot device and duets between quarreling queer lovers appear to be foreplay.

In her book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, prolific playwright, novelist, and activist Sarah Schulman detailed her experience living, writing, and eventually watching what came to be known as the highly-lauded Broadway musical. Except the musical wasn't hers at all — as she alleges, its writer, Jonathan Larson, took the plot, settings, characters, and themes from Schulman's 1990 novel People in Trouble, but gave her no credit.

Schulman was 28 when she joined the grassroots AIDS activist group ACT UP in 1987, a time when she simultaneously launched into a full-on affair with a married woman. The woman was an artist, but also quite homophobic, both internally and externally.

"My fantasy was that by exposing her to the realities of the AIDS crisis, she would drop her blinders about the functions of homophobia and simultaneously develop an understanding of the value of artwork rooted in experience," Schulman writes in Stagestruck.

It didn't work out for Schulman and her lover, but the story and its circumstances did inspire People in Trouble. A love triangle vacillating between the perspective of a lesbian, a bisexual artist, and her male partner, things come to a head when the artist stages a performance piece about a Trump-like landlord evicting people from their East Village homes because they have AIDS. The novel also features an interracial gay couple, one of whom dies of AIDS.

In Stagestruck, Schulman explains how a composer named Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie wanted to bring a musical adaptation of People in Trouble to the stage. "It would be the first AIDS opera for a closeted but AIDS-devastated opera world," she writes.

But from the beginning, directors and producers were not thrilled about the major relationship being between two women; even gay men within the theater industry made misogynistic and lesphobic remarks. Every attempt to bring People in Trouble to the stage or screen was thwarted, and so Schulman moved on to keep writing more plays and publish more books.

Seven years after the novel’s release, Schulman saw Rent for the first and last time. Jonathan Larson, the musical’s creator, had died the night before the show's first preview at only 35 years old. Schulman says that she, like many others, assumed he'd died of AIDS. But Larson (a straight white cis man) had a brain aneurysm, and his unexpected death led to a heightened sense of meaning to his new musical about living (at least, if you're a straight white guy).

As Schulman watched the musical that would eventually become the precursor to Hamilton, she writes about the experience watching scenes from her real life — and her subsequent novel -— on stage. Both followed mostly queer people living in the East Village in the early '90s, when AIDS was ravaging the artists community, except the central character in Rent, Mark, was a straight white guy (like Larson himself). The characters and stories from People in Trouble were slightly recast in Rent: The main character’s girlfriend, an artist, leaves him for a Black lesbian; AIDS was used as a plot point to kill off the Puerto Rican drag queen character, only to further the narrative for a heterosexual couple who also had AIDS but were able to survive.