portrait by Elisa Rolle
When I was a wee lad still in drama school at Boston University, I was dazzled by seeing Harvey Fierstein in Robert Patrick’s play THE HAUNTED HOST and became obsessed with the realm of gay theater. Now you can see gay plays everywhere — on Broadway, on TV — but in the mid-’70s it was a pretty tiny if growing field. I started writing reviews and features for Boston’s Gay Community News, and I made a pilgrimage to NYC to interview two of the pioneers of gay theater, Doric Wilson and John Glines. John went on to produce the first commercial production of TORCH SONG TRILOGY, which moved to Broadway and won Tony Awards for all of them. Picking up his Tony, John made it a point to thank his male lover, the first time such a sentiment had been uttered on network TV. John died yesterday morning at age 84 in Thailand, where he’d been living for many years, in the presence of his husband, Chaowarat Chiewvej. Here’s to a lovely man and a courageous pioneer. I went back and posted my 1976 interview with him, which is pretty naive and starry-eyed but hey, those were the days, my friend, those were the days.
another eye opens 