Earlier this year, Harvey Fierstein talked to Jezebel about writing his memoir during lockdown. He was guided by a bit of advice from his friend Shirley MacLaine, who’s no stranger to writing about her life/lives: “Let your memory guide you even when you’re writing about someone else.” And what memories they are. Fierstein writes about knowing he was gay from age 5, his cruising during pre-liberation Manhattan, working with members of the Warhol factory at the East Village experimental theater La MaMa, and his eventual ascendency to becoming one of Broadway’s biggest stars as the star and writer of Torch Song Trilogy, Broadway’s “first openly gay play with an openly gay lead.”
This guy was friends with early queer iconic activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and though his presence in pop culture has long been inherently political, he takes a compassionate approach when recalling an infamous 1983 interview with Barbara Walters, who asked him a bunch of dumb questions about being gay. “Credit Barbara Walters,” he writes. “She could have edited that interview to make me look like an asshole and for her to come off as a brilliant reporter. Instead, she made me look great, while she appears uninformed. She aired a discussion that to us seems conventional but back then was groundbreaking.” What a class act.
Fun fact: “Of the three legendary queens of Warhol,” Fierstein writes, “Holly [Woodlawn] was always my favorite. I could never catch what Candy Darling was talking about, and when I did, it wasn’t worth the effort. Jackie Curtis was a genius—absolutely—but she’d steal your lipstick, eat your sandwich, smoke your last cigarette, and get pissed that you didn’t have more to swipe.”