I used to tease them that they bused in heterosexuals because it was the law.

And all the teachers were professional artists and everyone was gay. I arrived at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, this total innocent from Brooklyn into this world of kids that wanted to be artists. In the book, your adolescence sounds pretty great. What makes that funny is how human it is, how it could be you. When I started writing, I realized that when you’re looking to talk to an audience, you have to find that line between the tragedy and the comedy and the humanity.

Like all your writing, your memoir is full of humor. I had no training and I listened to no one because children listen to no one. You end up with a voice kind of like Harry Belafonte, except not so pretty because I abused it early in my acting career. “I Was Better Last Night,” published by Knopf and described as “warm and enveloping” and full of “righteous rage” in a New York Times review, just released.Ĭan we get this out of the way at the top? What’s with your voice? Now, at 69, the multitalented Tony Award winner has added memoirist to his kaleidoscopic résumé. With trademark wit and empathy, he has written about himself in “Torch Song Trilogy” a father with a drag queen partner and a straight son in “La Cage Aux Folles” the bootlegging song and dance man Legs Diamond English factory workers and an unlikely firebrand in “Kinky Boots” heterosexual cross dressers in “Casa Valentina” striking newspaper boys in his Broadway adaptation of “Newsies” and a sissy duckling for an HBO animated special.Īnd he has revised the script for the musical “Funny Girl,” a show about Fanny Brice, an unlikely star like himself, which opens on Broadway this spring. The playwright, screenwriter, actor and drag performer has inhabited at least as many personalities as Walt Whitman.

The Sissy Duckling by Harvey Fierstein