Harvey Fierstein

Harvey Fierstein: Film.

Michael Kantor: On film, why, here’s a broad question, why do you think Broadway musicals have always had such special meaning for gay men?

Harvey Fierstein: Ah! Why did we… Ah! You gotta start with music. Music is that universal language, and music from music, you can’t… Ellen Stewart, when I was a kid, back at La Mama, and I used to write my plays, and Ellen would say, baby, you gots to write a music. And I said, well, because I can’t take these damn plays to Europe, you know, I can take them to the festivals. She said, you got all that conversing and nobody want to hear that damn conversing. Now you give me some music and anybody can understand that. So if you take Ellen’s explanation of that, then you understand why music reaches everyone. You have to start with music, being the basic form of the Broadway musical. Without the music, it’s drama and that’s a whole other thing. But music, and music speaks to you universally, speaks to everyone. What music does is conveys emotion in the way that speech doesn’t necessarily, unless you understand the language, the words, and everything else in the context. But music reaches beyond that when you are writing a Broadway musical you know, or writing in that form, you say when does it sing? You know, you talk up to the point where the emotion becomes so large that mere words don’t encompass it anymore, and then it’s and then the emotion elevates it to music. That is why opera, you know many people make fun of dramatic opera because it’s so dramatic, but it’s SO dramatic because it is music. If you did it without, it would seem melodramatic. In acting, but the music allows that extra motion and takes you to that next height, which also allows people that don’t even know what you’re singing about to experience it. So, since you have that context, which is the life “to the uber,” then you have gay men who seem to… go life “to the uber” easily, or more easily. I mean, I know a lot of gay people that hate opera, but I also know a lotta gay people that like opera, and I think there’s something to it. When you, um, I think for a lot of gay men in the theater, creating in the theater, writing in the theater, who were not allowed to express themselves in their own lives, to write about their own experience and all that. And they gravitated to the musical theater because they could take that fabulous emotion they were feeling and at least put it in a context that was gay, meaning uber. And even if they had to write about, you know, singing to Antoinette instead of to Tony instead of to Anton. So that may be why. I don’t know, but you know the joke, you take six Jewish gay men and put them in a room, what do you get? Broadway Musical, and it seems to work. I mean, look at Hairspray. Not a heterosexual in sight.

Michael Kantor: I hadn’t heard that joke, but I thought West Side Story, same thing.

Harvey Fierstein: Oh, no, well, but, you know, most, I mean, well there are some heterosexuals mixed in your, kind of country we live in, but you gotta let them in. They’re our kids, you now? Heterosexuals, you have to allow them here and there. They bus them in, bus them into theater.

Michael Kantor: There’s always been, as you pointed out, incredible gay talent working on Broadway, Cole Porter, Larry Hart, whatever. Before La Cage Aux Folles, how were gay men portrayed on stage? It was pretty stereotypical, wasn’t it?

Harvey Fierstein: No, there’s been everything. The tradition coming from Europe of drag, which had the gay thing under it, was quite normal. I mean, there were troops in the teens and 20s that there was an Irish troop that half of them did drag and half portrayed male roles. And there were acts like Savoy and Brennan, which is the drag act that taught Mae West. How to be herself, you know come up and see me sometime. That was the boy in Brennan the song “Margie,” you know, that’s a Margie. I’m always thinking that was the theme song, that was it. They were the precursor to Burns and Allen they were a stand-up act that I played for for Ziegfeld and And so the gay sensibility was always there. In fact in the 20s, it was less covered up than in the 50s of the 60s. They would do not only the Follies on Broadway, they would do the Greenwich Village Follies, which was a drag version of the Follies. They’d do the same numbers only downtown. So –

Michael Kantor: What a ha- how did La Cage-

Harvey Fierstein: But what I was gonna say, Mae West used gay characters in her plays right from the beginning. I mean, that’s why her plays were scandalous to some. She used drag characters. She had a play called The Drag. She wrote about gays and she wrote quite honestly about their lives and people always, whether they did the plays or not is another matter. I mean Eli Wallach once attacked me on an airplane like in 1981. Said you know you ain’t the first one to play a gay on Broadway you know I was and I said I know Staircase in 1960 whatever that was and yeah and and and for its time it was it was a very honest portrayal of a gay relationship a funny gay couple that living in the world that they knew and it was so we’ve always been there whether we got seen by large groups of people or That is the difference towards some trilogy. Hardly the first gay play on Broadway, but first gay played ever to make money on Broadway. And this is America. And unless you can make money, it don’t count. So, La Cage Aux Folles, hardly the first gay musical on Broadway but the first game musical to make money and that’s what makes it count. That’s what all of a sudden America turns around and goes, it makes money. Right now as we’re sitting here, there’s a TV show that just come on called the Queer Eye for a Straight Guy on Bravo of all things. I mean a cable station that’s usually number 75, right? In the ratings, it’s in the top 10. All of a suddenly, trust me on every executive office of every cable and network station in the world, there are gay shows not gonna be done because that’s what it’s about. You know, in America it’s about what sells and what makes money. So, where did we start this question?

Michael Kantor: No, that was great. Why do you think when people first came to see La Cage, what were they coming to see? Why was it a sell ?

Harvey Fierstein: La Cage Aux Folles had going for it that it was the most successful foreign film in history, which I think meant it made three million dollars. Something as ridiculous as that. You know, Americans, they really don’t want to have to work when they go to their movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger does really good, things we have to read the words at the bottom don’t do so good. So, but La Cage Aux Folles did have a large following because of that. It was a hit play in Paris for eight years. And so there was a name already attached to it. So when the show opened, it wasn’t, for the opening nighters, for the first people that would go to see La Cage Aux Folles wasn’t such a shock. They sort of knew what it was gonna be. They knew it was about a drag club. They knew that basic plot that Mame has also. I mean, there’s only so many plots. And… And it was already an established musical comedy plot and the twist on it was it was about a drag club and this conservative family and this wild family trying to have a wedding together. So for that first audience, it wasn’t such a shock. What was wonderful though was they may have known they were gonna see this farce, But they didn’t know what we had done to the forest I was handed a classic five act French farce that had been done in Paris that I was shocked when I read. It was so anti-gay. It was, they got, the way the husband got the drag queen, his drag queen wife on stage was by beating him up, you know, and then he had a big black eye and went, oh George, you really do love me. I mean, it was like, and I said, no, I’m not doing this. And Alan Carr said, no, you will do what you do with it. And I took this farce that was very much, it did have the elements of love, and don’t get me wrong, but it was very stereotypical, very demeaning of gays. It was almost a minstrel show, a gay minstral show in those terms. And I made it all about love. This was a couple that had been together for 20-something years. This was the best couple in the show. This was, this was the real loving married couple. Jerry Herman took that and made it sing once again, you know, when it came time to sing, when this boy needed to know who that drag queen was, you, when he wrote the song Look Over There. Of all the loves in your life, no matter how long you live, no matter who you love, no matters who loves you, no one will ever love you more than that man sitting over there, that person who raised you. They were not prepared for that. And Arthur Laurents likes to tell the story of how the three of us were sitting sort of in the back of the house at an early preview and there was a couple in front of us and when the gay couple began to sing Song in the Sand. They put their arms around each other. This was in Boston, a Boston triad, an early Boston triade, a middle-aged Boston proper couple put their hands around each and found their love for each other in this love that the two men were expressing on stage. That was the shock, that people were in drag, they were ready for, that they could understand their lives and have their lives illuminated by gay characters. That was a shock, but that was also the shock of Retort Song. You know, here’s somebody who they thought their lives were unlike, and only to find out we basically are all the same.

Michael Kantor: You talked about that. You talked about that…

Harvey Fierstein: See that, I went down the questions already. Well, thank you all for coming.

Michael Kantor: What’s the show’s moral? It’s sort of a wholesome idea.

Harvey Fierstein: Which, which one?

Michael Kantor: Uh… Back to uh… It’s sort of a wholesome idea that uh… You can challenge bigotry where it shows up

Harvey Fierstein: No, that show’s not about bigotry. That show’s about love. That show is, who are these people in your life? I mean, the people who learn lessons in that show are the son who somehow grew up in that home without ever having to put together that these two people, his father and his other father were everything to him, more important than any relationship he’d ever had. That’s the real lesson. The bigotry lesson is the farce plot that, because you didn’t really care about the villains in the piece. They were paper tigers. They didn’t learn anything. The one who learned something was the son. And the drag character who, for the first time in his life, puts his foot down and says, what’s become a sort of anthem in our community, I am what I am and I will be accepted this way or. You don’t get to be in my life.

Michael Kantor: That was my next question. If you could just give that as a topic sentence. What is, I am what I am. How does it function in the play? What is it?

Harvey Fierstein: Uh, well… When Jerry and I were writing the show, I would write a scene and then hand him the new scene. We’d go into Jerry’s house and we’d read the scene. Then he would take the scene from the week before and show me what he’d musicalized and that’s how we worked. So I’d write everything out. And I wrote a scene where the father of the boy comes to the drag character and says, this is the situation. It’s an ugly situation. These terrible people are coming. Our son wants to get married, you know, for a couple of hours. We will pretend to be people that we’re not. And then, for the rest of our lives, we will laugh about this. This will be one of those stories that we tell for the rest of out lives, how we pulled one over on them. And Trey, a character, says, you know what? You know, I’ve lived my life. I’ve taken all the bumps. I’ve, I’m taken all the hardships that one has to take. I have been beaten. I’ve been made fun of. They’ve called me names, but I do not, for any of that, ever say I’m not me. And I don’t pretend to be somebody else for any purpose. And that’s just what it is. I am what I am, and you take it that way. Or get the out. And, um… And Jerry musicalized that into a song that is fun and yet has that.

Michael Kantor: Do you think La Cage was a breakthrough for Broadway? Do you thing both on Broadway and around the country, it opened people’s eyes to something that they hadn’t been getting from Broadway? Thank you very much.

Harvey Fierstein: Well, like I said, La Cage Aux Folles opened on Broadway and was this huge hit and ran for five years. We sent out a tour and a bus and truck. We had two tours running that did incredibly well all around the country. When you do that and that many people see what you’re doing and embrace it and You are changing the world. You are, whatever the subject is, you’re changing the word. This happened to have the subject it did. Does it reach the number of people that television does? No way. I mean, it could run on Broadway for five years, sold out every performance. Still more people are gonna see the lowest rate of TV show one night than will ever have seen that on Broadway. Sorry. But when you reach people on the level that La Cage reached them, the level that live theater can reach you, which a movie can’t. A TV show can. Live theater reaches you in a way that only two people in the same room reach each other. It changes lives, I think. So, you know, something like Birdcage, which was a third-hand adaptation of La Cage, which made millions and millions of dollars, was obviously seen by millions and billions of people. Which one changed more lives in the long run? I’d go with the Broadway musical. I would say… Anybody who saw La Cage live on stage left the theater as a different person. Anybody who’s saw Birdcage, wonderful film as it is, was entertained but may not have changed their lives.

Michael Kantor: How many feet left on this one? Did the awareness of the growing AIDS epidemic affect La Cage?

Harvey Fierstein: Oh yeah, AIDS hit. We had opened on Broadway, we had opened off Broadway a tort song. And Jerry and I had just started writing La Cage when one cast member said he had to leave the show because he had, they thought maybe something he’d picked up in a trip to the Amazon. A parasite or something. They weren’t exactly sure what it was. The guy who replaced him came in and started having these strange rashes and night sweats. And then articles started appearing in The Village Voice about Carpostes sarcomas showing up in gay men in San Francisco. And we were writing La Cage at that moment and casting La Cage. And by the time La Cage opened, we knew. It had a name. We called it AIDS. It wasn’t the gay cancer anymore. We knew where it came from. We knew that it was affecting gay men. And the company of LaCage formed… They created events that are still on now. Gypsy of the Year competition, the Easter Bounty competition, these are Broadway events. Broadway Cares, Equity Fights, AIDS was formed, and the basic company of La Cage formed these events that have raised $24 million thus far for AIDS. And then of course the people started getting sick and dying, you know, the people in our community. We were losing people right from the beginning. The two gentlemen I talked about from Tord’s song both passed. And I mean I couldn’t even tell you how many people from Tords song or Lakash passed, but the majority of the cast is gone. And the same for other casts. So yeah, it was a huge effect on us. One critic actually said that I won the Tony Award for Tortsung as an AIDS sympathy vote. I love the press.

Michael Kantor: But by the time the show was established and was going out on tour, did the growing AIDS awareness in the country affect the way people saw the show? I don’t

Harvey Fierstein: I don’t know, that’s not anything that affected me, so I wouldn’t know. I mean, Gene Barry, who played the lead in La Cage, and I had it out a couple of times. There was a lot of stupidity back then. I don’t know if you remember an actress that refused to kiss another actor in Hollywood. Wouldn’t get on an elevator with the chorus boys in La Gage. These are people that he’d been rehearsing with, you know, he rehearsed with for months, had been out of town where they shared hotel, you know and they’d been together for years. All of a sudden he didn’t want to get on the elevator with them. I mean, that kind of stupidity at the beginning of the AIDS crisis was everywhere. So if it was in our community, people that should have known better. Why would it not have been in the general population? So I’m sure it was, but my fight was here. My battleground was here, I was here working. When we did the movie of Torch Song was the first large event, and I think that was 87, was the large event in Hollywood, where first movie opening, where the money actually went to AIDS. It took Hollywood that much longer to catch up to. You know, six years until Hollywood finally acknowledged the AIDS crisis and it took the death of Rock Hudson. But we’d already been battling. Broadway theater, we were already embroiled in the battle. It already started bankrupting Actors’ Equities Health Fund.

Michael Kantor: How do you think, in terms of musical theater alone, AIDS changed the course of musical theater effectively?

Harvey Fierstein: Just from the people that I know who died, we lost an entire generation of musical theater. If musical theater is gay men, and for the most part it is, we lost and entire generation designers. I say to people all the time, you don’t think we lost anything, you go to the museums and look for art, for new expressions of art from 1985 to 1995, and show me a new style. You go to Vogue and show me the new fashions that came out in those years. They aren’t there. You go home magazines and show the new styles in home decorating. They aren’t there. We lost an entire generation of geniuses because as we know, the sexually active, the sexually, you know, are gonna be the geniuses who are out questioning and doing and out in the middle of it all, you now? And those, that’s who we lost. We lost our children. We lost our youth. You know, we lost some older people, too, people like Michael Bennett, you know, but we lost our use. We have, even now, in those alive with AIDS in the community, you now, struggling, they’re not as productive as they could be. They spend half their time on drugs and in hospitals. You know they spend too much energy being sick. So I think we lost a lot, and what we lost we’ll never know.

Michael Kantor: Broadway musical is a place where you get to do something where you don’t get to anywhere else. What what what’s unique about? Larger than life? What are the adjectives? What’s the, what’s the allure of broad?

Harvey Fierstein: What is the lure of the Broadway musical? It is larger than life, that’s for sure. It’s fun, it’s noisy, it’s a bar mitzvah, it a wedding, every, you know, it all that stuff. It’s a celebration of life. When I go into the theater and I know I’m gonna see a play, I go in, you know, with my mind sort of focused, I’m going to see a playing, and I’m know I have to do some work, you now, hopefully and enjoy the drama and all that. When I got into a musical, I feel like I’m goin’ to a party. I always feel like I’m goin’ in with a bunch of other people to a part, and it’s gonna be exciting, and I gonna see trapeze artists, because singing and dancing is trapezoid work, you know? Are they going to hit the note every time? Am I going to get those goosebumps that only singing gives you, only Broadway musical gives you? Am I gonna be thrilled? Am I jump out of my seat screaming at the end of the Am I see one of those performances that you know you read about when you were a kid, seeing Eddie Cantor live on stage or Ethel Merman? The young Ethel carrying on on stage, or Mary Martin. I remember my parents, we certainly didn’t have money, but my parents insisted that we do something every weekend, whether it was a museum, a ballet. Or whatever, and we went to the Broadway theater. I can tell you, every show I saw, I can almost tell you what seat I sat in when I go back to that theater. I know what seat that I sat when that curtain went up and Mary Martin was sitting on a silly little carpeted platform on a mirrored stage with some smoke, but for me and everyone else in that audience, it was the top of a mountain. And she sang this silly song called The Sound of Music and my life was changed. I can tell you what it was like when the band came down the aisle when I saw Carnival and how thrilling that was, because I actually, I hit my brother and I said, something’s going on behind, and I say, there’s actors back there. I mean, that the actors actually came down in the aisle. It was amazing, or Oliver, or a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum, or How to Succeed, or Ethel Merman in Gypsy, I mean or Zero Maastell in Fiddler on the These were performances that I could do for you, almost, if I could put you in my mind. I could play them back as clearly as they’re at the Lincoln Center Library. They don’t ever leave you, they’re there. That’s what theater is. Movies don’t do that. Only live people and live people do that, only we touch each other that way, whatever that electricity is between people in that communication, in that theater. It’s magic. It really is magic. And I grew up with that and wanting that. And so when I went into theater and community theater and I was who I was, which was this kind of strange artistic boy who always studied painting and all that. And all of a sudden I was in theater and all of the sudden I working for Andy Warhol and he was putting me in a dress and… Then I was experimental theater and all that, and wrote my first plays, which were all musicals. I wrote Flatbush Tusca and Freaky Pussy and In Search of the Cobra Jewels, and Cannibals Just Don’t Know No Better. These were all music calls, but you know, the idea being these were my little downtown versions of a Broadway musical. But the dream, even you know in the back of my mind, like any kid that wants to be a rocketeer or the president. Was I wanted to be Ethel Merman. You know, Ethel had changed my life. Ethel gave me goosebumps up and down my arms and made me sit in a theater where I thought I would die if this show ever ended. And I wanted it to be that. And those are the dreams you let go of. You know because they’re never gonna happen. You know they’re just not gonna happen, you know and all these years later, this opportunity came as opportunities do in life. And I always say to everybody, your life is as exciting as the number of times you’re willing to say yes. Because most of the time we say no, you know, and all day long people are asking us to step out of our boxes, and I don’t care what life you live, you know, shoe salesman or not, people ask you all day long to step out the comfort box and it’s just easier to say no or turn away from that idea or whatever. I’ve been lucky enough to have been given parents that said, yes, yes. No matter how bizarre it is, yes Harvey, go, do. And this opportunity presented itself. And I stepped out of that thing and I’m sitting in Ethel Merman’s dressing room and I wear a big red wig and I wearing a dress. As unlikely as that’s gonna sing. And eight times a week, I sing, for me. And I get to sing Ethel’s immortal line. That’s as good as it gets, Cookie.

Michael Kantor: Dreams do come true.

Harvey Fierstein: They certainly do.

Michael Kantor: Well, that was growing up at what is Broadway means to you. Who is Ethel Merman? Let’s talk about hairspray. You’re here in Ethel Murman’s dressing room. What is hairspraying really about?

Harvey Fierstein: What is Hairspray really about? Hairsspray is really about the underdog. It’s, you know, once again, you got that. There are only so many plots. And this is one of those underdogs who just perseveres and breaks through and gets to the top of the heap. You know, you’ve got this little girl, this little fat girl who loves watching television, who loves this Corny Collins show, this little dance show, and she wants to be on that show. I mean, who can’t identify with that, but it’s a little fat girl. And she goes down to the studio and they say, you can’t, because you’re a little, fat girl, and we don’t like the little fat girls here. And through a bunch of circumstances and her just refusing to take no for an answer, not only does she get on the show, she also ends up with the boy and she ends up integrating the show forevermore and changing history in her little town of Baltimore. So it’s a lovely show. There’s nothing negative in it. You know, even the bigots in our show are, once again, they’re paper tigers. They ain’t going to hurt anybody as bad as bigotry is. We still kind of know they’re going to lose in the end, and the good guys are going to win. And it’s just a feel-good show about positive things. It’s it’s We don’t insult people, it doesn’t have that kind of humor, where sitcoms have become nothing but insult-a-thons. I watch these sitcoms and I say, if that’s how my friends talk to me, I would just say lose my number. You can’t talk to be that way. I mean, but that’s become humor in America instead, and that’s not what hairspray Air spray always tries to come out of a positive place.

Michael Kantor: Think of the word in the 20s and then My Fair Lady, Cinderella, is it a throwback to that classic?

Harvey Fierstein: Well, like I said, it’s the underdog winning. It’s a Cinderella story. It’s, you know, it is that, but. But it’s more because very rarely does a show do to an audience what hairspray does to an audience from the first performance. You know, they tried this show out in Seattle. Who goes to Seattle for theater, you know? I mean, people in Seattle don’t go to theater in Seattle, they go someplace else. But they tried to show out in Seattle in a 2,500 seat theater that looked like, have you ever seen the Fifth Avenue Theater? It looked like somebody gave you too much Chinese food before you went to bed and you got sick. It was designed as a testament to the opening of the Forbidden City. I mean, it is a Chinese nightmare. It’s a drag queen palace of bad Chinese taste with dragons here and the thing and the, I mean this huge. And we went to try out this play that nobody knew what it was. In fact, people would stop me on the street and say, are you playing the Warren Beatty role? They thought we were doing a musical, Shampoo. You know, John Waters, Hairspray, I don’t know what that is. They’d never obviously heard the score. These were all new songs. They barely knew who I was, you know, maybe from Independence Day or Mrs. Doubtfire, whatever. So when an audience, and the last thing they saw, you know it’s like they had, they had you know tickets because it was a a theater with a regular audience. So like they saw Robert Goulet in South Pacific and then Hairspray was in it. You know, it’s like this was our audience. They walked in for that very first show and whatever that magic is that’s Hairspray, which like I said, comes from a positive place, comes from place of love and positive and good energy and the right people winning and all of that to tear the seats out at that first performance. To rise from their seats screaming from that first preview on, and we’ve just passed our 400th performance on Broadway, and every night it’s the same, you know, 400 performances in, and I have the sneaking suspicion it will remain, you now, 4,000 performances in. It’ll be the same reaction to it. But that’s something magic that happens between an audience in the show.

Michael Kantor: There’s something American about that or what do you think it’s so American about that, you know? I mean, in the British, they wouldn’t rise out of their seats and get… Well, what is American about the Broadway musical, would you say?

Harvey Fierstein: And audience, audiences in different cultures do react differently, that’s absolutely true. I mean, I hated playing London. I played London with Torch Song. You know, the big fight scene between the mother and I in London, the audience practically covered their eyes. They can’t stand real emotion. You know pull out a knife, and to have a knife saw, that fine, they love that crap. Or you know when I got fucked in the back room, coulda gone out for three hours. They love watching me get fucked. But fight with my mother, they couldn’t take that. So an English audience and American audience are very different things. An American audience, I think, are very vocal. They are, we as Americans, we’re loud. We want our opinions known. We don’t wanna ever walk into a room and have people not know that we’re in that room. Hello, I’m over here. And so that is peculiarly American. So does that create, do you create? Entertainment for that audience, yeah, probably. That probably does shape who we are, you know. The Gong Show mentality is probably built into us very much. So there is probably something in that.

Michael Kantor: 9-11, did you feel like it, how did it affect Broadway?

Harvey Fierstein: I wasn’t working at the time, 9-11, I was in Connecticut and I got calls to come in and do benefits and I started coming in and doing benefits pretty soon after 9- 11. But the one that I guess I felt most, they called us and said they wanted to do a TV commercial saying come back to Broadway, everything’s fine, and they got I think around 100. Broadway performers out in the middle of Times Square, singing New York, New York. And… It felt like AIDS again. It did. It felt, it felt, you know, when you’ve been through a war like AIDS and you’ve seen everyone you know die. It gives you a different perspective to something like 9-1-1, you know? I mean, it was a horrible tragedy and all, but you kind of knew it was a finite thing, as terrible as it was. And I knew that our community would be there raising money. We always do. That’s what we do. We’re in show business. You know, we do eight shows a week. We work six days a week, we work endlessly, and then on our time off, we do benefits or this stuff. I mean that’s what do. So it had a different feeling for me. But when it came to the first anniversary of 9-1-1, we were playing here in the theater. And they said, Harvey, we want to do something. And I said, all right, I’ll write a few words. We’ll do something at the bow. Said, I don’t think we want do anything before. We want to let the audience get their escape, because that hairspray is a wonderful escape from reality. And we knew we were doing that as a public service. I mean, all along, for the entire time we’d been running, whatever problems you have, come see Hairspray. They go away for two and a half hours. I can promise you that. So I didn’t want to do anything before the performance. But we did our bow, and at the end of the bow, I stepped forward and I read a statement, and our back wall changed into an American flag. And a group of our wonderful ensemble members came forward and saying, God bless America, and it was really quite an emotional moment for all of us, you know. We celebrate in public and we mourn in public, you know. Those are the things we do. And theater, I mean, funerals are theater, and mourning is theater, so it does fit in the theater.

Michael Kantor: Jeff, any last questions? I’d love to get that Cole Porter. Gene Howard, the photographer, has called him wicked and cute. We just need your take on who Cole Porter was or what just happened. Just a few words.

Harvey Fierstein: Cole Porter obviously was a genius, and as I hear, he was pretty insatiable. In between that, who cares? He wrote some incredible songs. You know, people like Cole Porter, it’s so hard for me to comment because as a kid, I’d watch this, you know, Cary Grant play Cole Porter and go, he was gay. What was that like, you what’s with the Alexa Smith? What kind of nonsense is this? You know what I mean? So I always approach people like that with more anger than anything else. And of course it wasn’t Cole Porter’s fault. You know he had, he he was openly gay. It’s heterosexuals, you why they have to steal our people, you I just. Well, if I had to deal with heterosexual culture, I’d want to make believe gay culture was mine also, wouldn’t you? Heterosexual probably designed that shirt.