How Harvey Fierstein Has Always Led the Way for Queer Visibility
I Was Better Last Night (Knopf, 2022), couldn’t be better timed. Harvey’s voice has always been singular, and I don’t mean the sound of it.In 1983 when I was a 17-year-old gay kid on Long Island, I sat in my wood-paneled bedroom, my tiny black-and-white TV resting on my lap as I watched transfixed as Barbara Walters interviewed Harvey Fierstein.
I was astonished when Harvey told Barbara, “I assume that everyone is gay unless I’m told otherwise.” My gay self-esteem was just in the embryo stage, and that was a staggering paradigm shift for me.
And when Barbara self-righteously said to Harvey, “A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do an interview like this,” Harvey told the most famous journalist in the world, “You could have done it and you should have done it.” How could I be any less brave in my life than he was being on national television?
That night, Harvey explained to the nation that love, commitment, family are not heterosexual experiences, they are human experiences, they belong to all people.
