"No Opened Doors for Me"

By Gerald Clarke

Harvey Fierstein and Torch Song Trilogy win two big Tonys

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 Moet 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 Trilogy, and a second as best actor, for his starring role in the play. Says he, exultantly: "I feel like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland all rolled into one!"

Or 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 is not all that bad an idea. If the MX missile could talk, it might well sound like Fierstein--hoarse, raspy and very direct.

That directness has made Torch Song a commercial success when the anticipated failure of other plays with gay themes has sent Broadway producers fleeing. Homosexuals have long been a vital part of the theater, of course--Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Tennessee Williams come immediately to mind--and it can be argued that much of Broadway is infused with a gay sensibility. But never before has an out-of-the-closet play like Torch Song done so well with straight, middle-class audiences. For 3 hours and 40 minutes they enter into the life of Arnold Beckoff, who makes his living performing as a drag queen in a New York City nightclub. He falls in love with a schoolteacher, loses him to a woman, then falls in love again, only to 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-respect, the realization that homosexuals can be just as moral as heterosexuals."

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. "I was what I was, and it wasn't a family decision." Later Fierstein attended Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where he studied painting; like Arnold, he worked as a female impersonator.

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. "Go for it." The Glines production company, which is dedicated to supporting works with homosexual themes, asked to produce the trilogy, and Torch Song opened off- off-Broadway in October 1981. Very gradually it became a hit; it moved to Broadway last June. Now many people, straight as well as gay, come back again and again. Still, the play probably speaks most pointedly, and poignantly, to homosexuals. "Gays grow up listening to heterosexual songs and watching heterosexual movies," says Fierstein. "It's good for them to see one of their own struggling to be himself, rather than watching Now Voyager and deciding whether they are Bette Davis or Paul Henreid." The success of Torch Song, Fierstein believes, will make it easier for other gay plays to find backers, as well as audiences. "Producers who wouldn't touch a gay show are now asking for one," he says.

"When there's a market they can tap, they will go after it." Though Torch Song's success has lifted his career into orbit, it has not changed Fierstein's life very much in other ways. He still has an apartment in Brooklyn, where he lives alone with two dogs, still rides the subways and is still trying to curb, without much apparent progress, an overly generous waistline. His former lover, the bisexual schoolteacher, was thrilled to see Fierstein win the Tonys; Fierstein, meanwhile, has become involved with another actor-writer. Right now, however, he is thinking about life after Torch Song, packing up in his dressing room, and saying goodbye to his pet rabbit, Arnold; a friend gave him the creature on the Broadway opening night, and it has resided in his dressing room ever since. "I told my replacement, David Garrison, that Arnold goes with the part," he jokes, then adds, more seriously, "No one opened doors for me. I banged on them, and got in. The big question is whether I can keep them open--and open others along the way.''

--By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.