another eye opens

It’s hard to believe it’s been 40 years since the first glimmer of Harvey Fierstein’s epochal gay play Torch Song Trilogy emerged. As I’m gearing up to see the revival at the Second Stage, directed by Moises Kaufman and now titled Torch Song, I’ve been going through my Fierstein file folder, reviewing the history of my relationship with the gravel-voiced legend. I met Harvey in 1975 when I was in college at Boston University and he was starring in a local production of Robert Patrick’s The Haunted Host. We became friends, or friendly in the way that young journalists and the young artists they cover favorably can be.

Throughout the years of writing the plays that eventually became Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey kept in touch with me, sending me scripts and gossipy letters and postcards. I interviewed him several times over the years, but the first time was in February 1978, for an article published in The Advocate, when he was performing The International Stud (the first play of the trilogy) at La Mama. The picture above was taken by Allen Tannenbaum, staff photographer for the Soho Weekly News, during the 1978 Off-Broadway run of Stud at the Players Theater on MacDougal Street.

As a treat from the archives, I’m posting here the typewritten transcript of that interview. Check it out and let me know what you think.