“Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein

When Torch Song Trilogy opened in 1982, the show’s playwright and star, Harvey Fierstein, was lauded as the first openly gay writer and lead actor on Broadway. In an interview with Barbara Walters the following year, Fierstein scoffed at the dubious distinction: “Isn’t it totally ridiculous that I’m getting all this attention because I’m the first openly gay [Broadway star and playwright]?” Schooling a visibly perplexed Walters, he explained, “You know that the women in your audience are sitting out there, and they go to see movies and they’re dying over these gorgeous men, [who] you know they’re gay.”(1) Out-spoken and unafraid to be controversial, Fierstein, a four-time Tony-Award winning writer and performer, is both a prolific artist and committed activist. He was at the forefront of the nascent AIDS protests and grassroots fundraising, and he remains a staunch advocate for LGBTQ+ visibility and rights.

In a career spanning more than fifty years, Fierstein got his start with the Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and while still a teenager, he appeared in Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971). As he writes in his memoir, I Was Better Last Night (2022), he played Amelia, “an asthmatic lesbian maid with a penchant for porn mags and plate jobs.”(2) (Fierstein advises non-squeamish and scatological-curious readers to look up the latter fetish.) Experimental and semi-autobiographical work followed, including the three plays comprising Torch Song Trilogy, International Stud (1978), Fugue in a Nursery (1979), and Widows and Children First (1979), all of which began at La MaMa in New York City’s East Village. In addition to Torch Song, Fierstein’s Broadway plays, Safe Sex (1987) and Casa Valentina (2014), confront issues affecting LGBTQ+ communities.

As a librettist, Fierstein has been instrumental in bringing the American musical out of the closet. La Cage aux Folles (1983) is credited as the first Broadway musical to feature a gay couple as the main characters, and the show has proven to be remarkably durable and revivable. His book for A Catered Affair (2008), based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky and Gore Vidal’s film adaptation, includes a lonely gay uncle (played by Fierstein originally), embittered by a sense of exclusion from his own extended family. Kinky Boots (2013) ran on Broadway for six years, and the musical celebrates community, pride, and the complexities of gender and sexual identities. Fierstein, with his distinctive and oft-imitated gravelly voice, is a unique figure in queer theatre history, and he continues to be a brash and uninhibited spokesperson for a new generation of LGBTQ+ individuals.

James Wilson: In a nod to Harry Hay, you dedicate your memoir “to the radical fairies who flew before” you. Who were the most significant radical fairies on your life and work?

Harvey Fierstein: I was thrown into the gay community very young. I didn't know about the prejudice and stuff until later in life because when I joined [the Gallery Players in Brooklyn], everyone was gay. There were a couple of heterosexuals, but they bussed them in! Everyone else was gay. I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and all these older men and women were all gay and lesbian.

And now it’s so funny to me to think of her as a famous person, but there was Marsha P. Johnson and the street queens. We all hung out together on Christopher Street and none of us had money to go into a bar. Even when I was older, I didn't have the money to go to a bar. I was working at La MaMa or at WPA or whatever. I was making fifty dollars a week, which barely covered my subway to and from the city. So, we just all hung out on the street together. But it was these people who lived the gay life who were so natural in it that it never occurred to me to ever lie. I mean, the idea of coming out of the closet was so strange to me because I couldn't imagine being in the closet, you know? We’re not talking about mother and father stuff, we’re talking about in the real world. And that was the kind of real world that I lived in.

And I’m thinking of the playwrights who wrote for me: I had H.M. Koutoukas, Robert Patrick, Billy Hoffman, and Paul Foster, who always wore those white shirts, making him look straighter! Then there was María Irene Fornés. Ronald Tavel, of course, and Harvey Tavel, were huge influences, as were Donald L. Brooks and John Vaccaro’s [Play-House of the Ridiculous] troupe.

[Laughing.] I was just laughing because I saw an interview with Diane Lane, and I knew Diane Lane as the naked little girl who was carried over the heads in Andrei Serban’s The Trojan Women. That’s how I remember her! And then all of a sudden, she was a movie star!

Wilson: You mention H.M. Koutoukas, and that makes you a direct descendant of the Caffe Cino and the birth of Off-Off-Broadway.

Fierstein: The Cino was gone already, but there was Robert Patrick, Donald L. Brooks, and the dancer James Waring.

Wilson: And the Trocks?(3)

Fierstein: The Trockadero came along later. Eric Concklin was one of the lead ballerinas for the Trockadero, and he directed all my early plays. And Tony Bassae was also a Trockadero. And of course, the lead ballerina, Larry Ree—he and Eric worked together dressing shows.

Wilson: What were performances at La MaMa and other Off-Off-Broadway theatres like in the 1970s and 1980s?

Fierstein: They were inspirational. There was a wildness and a “Join us!” kind of spirit. The first show that I did with the Play-House of the Ridiculous when John Vaccaro asked me to come in was called Persia: A Desert Cheapie [by Vaccaro and Bernard Roth] in the second-floor theatre at La MaMa. He had ramps built down the two sides with a stage at one end and a stage at the other, and the audience was in the center, and we were on the four platforms. We ran around the audience, and it was absolute chaos. We also did [Paul Foster’s] Satyricon on those four platforms. It just occurred to me this moment that Andrei Serban was doing the same thing in the basement, and I wonder if John ripped that idea off Andrei! I don't know.

But anyway, so we would perform in this very much in-your-face manner: The audience would come in. Ellen [Stewart] would come out with her bell, and say, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to experimental theater, dedicated to the artists and all aspects of the theater. . . .” She’d make her announcement and leave. When she was done, the audience sat down on the ground to watch the show, and John Vaccaro would come out and shout, “Get up, you lazy mother fuckers! Stand the fuck up! Who told you to sit down? Get the fuck up!” I absolutely love that.

Wilson: You said in a recent interview, “I wish that experimental theater still existed. There were a few of us that I would say destroyed Off-Off-Broadway. I think greed is what destroyed Off-Off-Broadway.”(4) Can you explain what you mean by that?

Fierstein: I’m trying to think of the first one who actually crossed over. I mean, I know one of the early ones was Hair, of course. You know, Tom [O’Horgan] moved Hair to Broadway.

Wilson: Hadn’t Dames at Sea moved from the Chino to Off-Broadway?

Fierstein: Oh, yeah, but that was so much earlier. That was way before I arrived. I don’t know what effect that really had. I mean, everyone was aspirational in that way. You had Bette Midler or Sly Stallone doing a role at La MaMa and then moving on, but they never turned around and looked back. You know, I never heard Sylvester Stallone send Ellen a check. And as much as I love Bette, I’ve never been able to get her to do a benefit with me for La MaMa. But it was Tom Eyen that directed her. I don’t remember who Sly Stallone was with when he did a show.

But anyway, what happened was Hair moved, and all of a sudden, there’s this possibility of making money. You know, instead of fifty dollars a week that we were getting from Ellen, there was the possibility of more. Paul Foster was just pushing and pushing. One of the famous ones was Elizabeth I. It was a musical starring Ruby Lynn Reyner. Ruby’s still around. You could always talk to her, but I think it lasted one night on Broadway.(5) Jerry Ragni and [Galt MacDermot]’s next show where they once again went to a Broadway theater—I forget what theater it was—and hollowed it out to make it look like . . . like outer space.

Wilson: Was that Dude?

Fierstein: Dude! And that also was like, boom!(6) So, there were people trying. And then Tom [O’Horgan] did Jesus Christ Superstar. And then after that it was this constant push to have another hit, which never happened for him because he did the one about Joe McCarthy, Senator Joe, I think it was called, and which was a commercial production.(7) But there was that kind of push.

I was doing my shows, and I can’t say I wanted them to move. I certainly wasn’t against them moving, but I would have rather just run them longer at La MaMa. International Stud moved Off-Broadway and bombed. Widows and Children and A Fugue in a Nursery then moved Off-Broadway and bombed, and then the Broadway rights for Torch Song never happened. And you know, they brought in Joan Darling, who had done an episode of Mary Tyler Moore. In our world that made her a big director, I guess. Nice woman. As I remember, she didn’t want me in the show. She wanted Austin Pendleton to play Arnold, and I’m trying to remember who she wanted for the mother. But it was somebody equally not right. Estelle Getty, who was “Estelle Gettleman” at that time, would call me every night saying, “You can’t let them do this to me! That’s my role! It’s my role!” I kept saying, “Estelle, it’s never gonna happen. Calm down. It’s never gonna happen.”

Wilson: And that was for the Off-Broadway production when it went to the Actors’ Playhouse, or when it was going to Broadway?

Fierstein: It had been bought for Broadway by a producer, but never happened. And then we did the reading for the Glines, and Lawrence Lane called me and said, “Can we meet and talk?” And I took my last dollar—took the subway in from Brooklyn on my last dollar. We had this meeting, where he said after that reading, we want to produce Torch Song Off-Broadway. I had to borrow a dollar to get home from him. But thankfully, he lent me a dollar.

Wilson: Switching topics but related to Torch Song: You began your career in drag, and I’m just wondering how you feel now about the commercialization of drag, and, on the flip side, the demonization of drag. They’re going after the Drag Queen Story Hours, for instance, which might be similar to your experiences doing drag in the 1970s and 80s.

Fierstein: I was doing drag in a world which had no problem with doing drag. You know, when I was doing Flatbush Tosca or In Search of the Cobra Jewels or Freaky Pussy, my world had no problem with drag. What you’re talking about is once we moved Torch Song Trilogy. But there was something a little bit more challenging than drag: I was getting fucked up the ass center stage in the fourth scene. So, putting on a dress really didn’t seem like too much of a problem to the audience. That was not the scene I was asked to cut before it moved to Broadway. I was asked to cut the fuck-up-the-ass scene, so I have to say, I didn’t have that problem.

Also, we were not as pretty. I mean, Jesus Christ, I look at these queens and these makeup jobs, and you can faint. You know, Nina West just played Edna in the non-union tour of Hairspray, and she’s gotten better and better at her makeup. They all get better and better at their makeup. But they are so gorgeous. And the wigs are so gorgeous. We never dreamed. I mean, we slapped that shit on. And we put some glitter on top of it, and huge eyelashes, and we thought that was drag. We would have been laughed out of—I mean, not a single one of us would have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race as it is, but RuPaul wouldn’t have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race! I remember Ru when he first started at the Pyramid Club down on Avenue A, I think it was. He did that show, he and Lady Bunny, and those queens wouldn’t have made it. It’s gotten so sophisticated and so gorgeous.

Wilson: I saw the original La Cage, which was brilliant, but if you compare those queens to the most recent revival, there’s a huge difference.

Fierstein: Well, there’s been a problem with La Cage. The original production you had Arthur Laurents, who was scared to death and stuck two women in the chorus and made one of the gentlemen, Sam Singhaus, grow his hair long. So, when they pulled off their wigs, the two women would show that they were women, but one of the men had hair as long as the women. [Laurents] was so scared of so much of that stuff, which, of course you wouldn’t see now. On the other hand, I was very thrilled to see a woman on RuPaul’s Drag Race—and a heterosexual drag queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race—which says to me we are growing still, our community is growing still.(8)

That was the original production, and Theoni V. Aldredge put them in those Erté coats, and they had fun little costumes and all that. And she tried to make them as pretty as possible. The revival that Jerry Zaks did, Jerry Mitchell had them dancing and—when they did the can-can, their chests were totally exposed.(9) There was nothing about them that said, “We’re girls.” These were muscular men doing muscular male dances. The gender fuck was in there, but you never felt they wanted to be drag queens. You didn’t. There was no love of it. Even Gary Beach’s performance was lovely, but I never felt that that’s who he was, that he was Zaza, and that this was important to him and that he felt beautiful this way. He never felt that. I thought that production was—but as I say in the book, I just turned to Jerry Herman and said, “I don’t like any of these choices, so let’s make a deal. You give me the next production; I'll give you this one.” He said, “Fine.” And so, he got his orchestra that he wanted. He got his singers that he wanted. I mean, that was the production where I said, “Are you telling me you would have rather had Beverly Sills play Dolly instead of Carol [Channing]?” And he said, “Absolutely.” It was about the music.

And when the next production happened—David Babani’s production at the Menier Chocolate Factory—once again, they brought in a heterosexual director. I love him, and there was so much that Terry [Johnson] did that I really loved, but they brought in a heterosexual cast again. But the drag queens at least were having fun. They were enjoying who they were, and I felt that more. And in Doug Hodge’s performance, I felt that Zaza was there. I felt that very much. He’s a wonderful actor and his Zaza was one of my favorites.(10)

Wilson: My favorite was you. I saw you and Chris Sieber, and that was the ideal La Cage for me.

Fierstein: Well, we were already so beaten up by then because we’d gone through that shit with what’s his face, who’s now not allowed—the one I was put in with.

Wilson: Jeffrey Tambor.

Fierstein: Jeffrey Tambor! And we went through that, and then the reviews—we didn’t even have reviews because he only lasted like ten days.(11) But what a horror that was. And then the understudy had to go on. Finally, Chris came in. When Chris came in, we sort of knew the writing was on the wall because as sold out as it was, once the word got out about [what] bad shape it was in, the ticket sales just disappeared, and I knew we weren’t going to run very long. We had a really good time together. It was lovely to have this gay couple that really cared about each other. I could play with that role and play with a couple of lines and stuff like that. In the “La Cage” scene, I did a tribute to Charles Pierce. If you remember, I did his Marlene. [As Marlene Dietrich:] “I’m going to tell the story of a girl. She look at him. He give her a heart. She look at it and give it back. I tell the story now.” I just played with that kind of stuff. We’ve never had the La Cage chorus line being female impersonators. We’ve never done that. Like I said, I did it a little. Doug Hodge did it a little bit. Did you see Doug? He did Piaf. He sort of walked out as Piaf, and it was very funny. I love the idea of playing with that to show the culture—to have the gay culture of who we love.

Wilson: I watched an interview you did with Vito Russo days before La Cage started performances.(12) It took place in your Torch Song dressing room, and you predicted then that “I Am What I Am” will be a gay anthem.

Fierstein: I did? Well, you know, I wrote it as a monologue, and then Jerry took it and turned it into the song. “I Am What I Am” comes out of my book for La Cage, but “A Little More Mascara” was actually Jerry musicalizing the opening of Torch Song Trilogy—the drag scene. That was the first thing he ever played for me before we even started writing the show. I went up to his house and we went up to the fourth floor to his studio, and he said, “I really wanna sing this tribute that I wrote for you,” and he sang “A Little More Mascara.” And he said that’s how we should open the show. And I said, “No, no, no. I don't think so. We did that with Torch Song.” I said, “A musical should open with a big musical number. A gay musical should open with a really big gay musical number!”

That was the birth of that. What he would tell you while he was still alive—and Arthur would tell you also—I predicted then that “Look Over There” would become a song that everyone sang at every wedding and everything. I still think that song is so gorgeous. “Look Over There” is for anyone who loves you the most. Jerry will tell you how wrong I was because when Harry Como came to him to record from La Cage, he tried to push “Look Over There” because of me. And of course, Perry Como only wanted to sing “Song on the Sand.” He sort of had a little AM [radio] hit with it.

Wilson: And there was the disco version of “I Am What I Am.”

Fierstein: Shirley Bassey had her big hit with “I Am What I Am.”

Wilson: About the recent Torch Song production, you wrote in your book, “There was no tension left, no danger. The fear was gone.” I’m curious to hear more about that experience of what it was like in 2017. And how do you see queer theatre in 2024?

Fierstein: I felt the same thing when I saw [the 2018 revival of] The Boys in the Band. It wasn’t dangerous anymore, whereas it really was dangerous to see that kind of theatre. When I would look at an audience—not Off-Broadway of [the original] Torch Song—but when we moved to Broadway, it was all straight people with gay people mixed in, many times in couples looking more like straight people. When the movie opened, there was a cartoon in New Yorker, I think it was, that showed the front of a movie theatre and it was Tequila Sunrise, The Terminator, and Torch Song Trilogy—three “T’s.” A man says to his friends, “I’m not getting in that line.” They wouldn't even go near the theatre. That feeling was gone in 2017. The audience was very largely gay, and they came in with an ownership of Torch Song. It wasn’t my show anymore; it wasn’t this daring thing anymore. They came in with an ownership of it. And so, they sat there and waited for their moments. There was not even an anticipation of the story. They knew the story too well. It was like watching The Rocky Horror Show for the 700th time. That was hard for me because I want an audience to see something, and they weren’t seeing something new.

Also, the casting was not my favorite. I love the two young men in it. I absolutely love them as actors. But both of them were way too old. David, the character of the son is fifteen years old. Matthew [Broderick] was eighteen. The boy who played it originally, Fred [Allen], was seventeen, I think. And this kid in the revival was twenty-eight or something. I mean, he was actually older than the boy who played Alan. Both of them should be dangerous. And the danger of the character of Alan is that he’s so close to the other one’s age, that you say, “Wait, you were just sleeping with somebody that age, and now he’s your son?” There was no danger. Partly because the audience knew what was coming, and partly because of the casting. There was no drama of a kid knowing who he is. The kid, David, knows who he is better than Arnold knows who he is. Obviously, more than Ed knows who he is. They were wonderful actors, and I love them. I was greatly disappointed in that. The only roles that worked—the only challenging roles were Arnold, Ed—the character just wanting to be straight and all that still worked just fine; people understood that—and the mother character.

Wilson: It’s interesting that you mention David because his depiction is particularly dangerous, and I’m surprised it wasn’t more of a scandal originally. People don’t talk about kids and sexuality, and here you have in 1979, a fifteen-year-old kid who, as you say, was very sure of his sexuality.

Fierstein: And he could walk out that door and make his living. Alan was a hustler, and both of them were hustlers. In the very first runs, audiences were scared of it. Period. To even talk about it. In the later runs, they just accepted it. And it’s sort of funny because people don’t talk about gay kids unless it’s really in a precious kind of way. You know, the lovely coming-out pieces that are not dangerous at all. But it’s a very dangerous thing for a kid.

Wilson: Relatedly, one of my favorite moments in the film The Celluloid Closet is when you embrace the sissy stereotype, and you pursue that in your children’s book The Sissy Duckling.

Fierstein: Well, there’s something that’s sort of interesting happening right this moment. Someone has written a musical version of Sissy Duckling, a children’s theatre piece. I think she’s done a nice job of it. They went to MTI, who are the people that license out these shows, and MTI said, “Well, we might have a problem with this, not with the content directly, but calling it the ‘Sissy Duckling.’” I need to write a two-three sentence response to MTI saying, “You don’t understand. It’s not the word that’s hurtful. He’s willing to accept that. You want to call him a Sissy? Go ahead and call him a Sissy.”

Yes, I am a Sissy and I’m proud of it. It is who I am. And if you wanna put the word Sissy on it, that’s fine with me. I don’t care. You wanna call me a faggot? I don’t care. I, for one, will never really be comfortable with queer. I accept that. It’s another generation, and it’s their choice.

I think I talked about in the book when all of a sudden on Gay Day, and it was one of the first times that we were starting up at Central Park as opposed to starting in the village, and they turned everything all around. We had those years where we were marching uptown, and they were marching downtown. The original Stonewallers were marching uptown! Anyway, I guess we worked it all out, because now we have floats! But I arrived at the fountain up at Central Park, and the biggest group there was the Marriage Equality group. I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with you? We can be put in jail. We can lose our apartments. And you care about wearing a wedding dress? What is wrong with you?” But I shut up because I said, “Look at them—I mean, I was thirty-five or forty—they are the young generation. They’re the next ones. We had our fight. We fought our fight. This is their fight. If this is what they want, this is what they want.” And they turned out to be right because many heterosexuals were able to say, “Oh, you want to be able to visit so-and-so in the hospital? I get that. Oh, you don’t want to lose your apartment if that one dies? I get that. Oh, you want to inherit this? I get that. You want to be on the life insurance or the health insurance? I get that.” In a funny way, they were very right about that being the next level of our fight.

And now, people have said, “Aren’t you gonna make any real statement about Trump and about this Project 2025 and all that?” And I say, “I’m not sure yet. I need to see if this next generation is going to say this is what our fight is about.” I mean Project 2025 is attacking it all. They want to make gay marriage illegal. They want to take us out of the school system.

Someone published a list of the top ten banned musicals. (Because of course they don’t care about plays. You actually have to listen in a play.) But the top ten musicals to be banned from schools, and I’m very proud to say I wrote three of them: La Cage, Hairspray, and Kinky Boots.(13) I heard that my book Sissy Duckling is banned from schools, and I’m very proud.

Wilson: Do you get to New York much? I was wondering if you’ve seen Oh, Mary!

Fierstein: No, I have not seen that. You know, COVID changed so much, just reshaped everything—made me a lot more lazy. I don’t go in as often. I saw a bunch of shows around the 2024 Tony’s, and I was invited to the opening night of Oh, Mary!, but I didn’t go. I saw Cabaret because I know half the cast, and half the cast of Hell’s Kitchen, and I presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Jack O’Brien. The city has changed so much. I don’t think it’s just my age. I think it feels different when I walk down the street in the city. It just feels. . . off.

Wilson: I still go to the theatre a lot, but theatre is different. It’s just become so ridiculously expensive, which is a shame.

Fierstein: What do you think is the answer? What would you do?

Wilson: I honestly don’t know.

Fierstein: I’m curious because these are questions I ask myself every day. I obviously still have a lot of friends in the theatre, and they come up and stay with me to get away from it. And I’m asked to do theatre a lot, which I turn down constantly. I turn down these offers because they’re just not thrilling to me. There’s nothing new enough to make me want to go work six days a week. I’d rather sew.

Wilson: As an academic and as a teacher, I am really moved by your nurturing quality among your castmates, and you call your online followers your “children.” Where does that come from?

Fierstein: It was the way I was treated. I mean, Ellen Stewart was my mama, and my mother was my mother. The two of them talked to each other that way: “You’re his mama.” “You’re his mother.” So, it could be partly that. But even the older men, such as the director of the Gallery Players, took me to Fire Island for the first time, and I stayed in his house that he called Poverty Gardens. I saw what the gay scene looked like when I was still way underage to have sex or anything. “Each one, teach one?” That’s my attitude.

*Author Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Above: Fierstein in the East Village, early 1970s. Photo by Irene Stein.