Word: fierstein
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...perhaps merely the year's hot property. Many Hollywood studios are bidding for Torch Song Trilogy, which is a funny, sad, always touching story about homosexuals. Producers in more than half a dozen foreign countries have purchased the rights. Fierstein left the show last week to finish work in Boston on a musical version of La Cage aux Folles, for which he has written the book and which is scheduled to open on Broadway in August. Suddenly he is in demand. One producer even wants him to be the voice of the MX missile in a film comedy, which...
Three bottles of champagne stand against the wall, messengers keep bringing him cards and telegrams of congratulation, and Harvey Fierstein is understandably elated. Elated? Levitated might be a better word. At the moment, Fierstein is floating 25 stories above his dressing room at Broadway's Little Theater. The previous night his friends gave him a party for his 29th birthday (the Moët is a reminder); the evening before that, he pulled off the equivalent of a grand slam at the Tony ceremonies: he won two awards, one for writing the year's best play, Torch Song...
...have that lover killed by a gang of gay baiters. What Arnold really wants is to have a family, like everyone else, and he winds up adopting a gay 15-year-old. "What's nice about Arnold is that he's struggling to be truthful," says Fierstein. "Not many people do. At the beginning we meet him in full drag, and at the end he's naked, so to speak. I've written a play in which homosexuals don't commit suicide at the end or repent their evil ways. The basic theme is self...
Some of the play is unabashedly autobiographical. Like Arnold, Fierstein grew up in a lower-middle-class area of Brooklyn. "No one says he had a normal, happy childhood, and I guess mine was as peculiar as anyone else's. I was a fat kid and grew up like an average fat kid. It's never easy, but it isn't the hardest thing in the world, either." He told his parents he was gay when he was 13, and the discovery was not particularly traumatic. "There was no crying or screaming in my presence," he recalls...
After his graduation in 1973, he turned to playwriting. The first part of Torch Song was performed off-off-Broadway in 1978, with the second and third parts following in 1979. But when Fierstein wanted them produced as a trilogy, people he went to would not buy. "Producers said that no one would sit still that long [the play was then well over four hours] and that it was too homosexual," he says. Fierstein himself questioned what he was doing, but finally his straight brother Ronald, 32, put him right. "You've got a vision," he said...