Radical gay theater lost its danger

I finished the book I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein. It’s his autobiography published in 2022. He calls it a memoir because it deals mostly with his life in the theater. I think it is more of a biography because it deals with a lot more than his theater life. His life in theater has been significant. From the start he was an out gay man. He frequently played female roles in drag. He won Tony Awards for writing Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage Aux Folles. He won Tonys for acting in Torch Song Trilogy and as Edna in Hairspray. He also wrote Kinky Boots, turned Newsies from a Disney flop movie into a successful Broadway musical, wrote Casa Valentina, and an updated TV version of The Wiz. His acting also includes a long stint as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Of course, there were many other scripts and acting jobs. Fierstein didn’t study theater. He studied art, both in an arts high school and college. The art got him into theater when he was asked to make posters for a play and a friend convinced him to audition. Much of his 20s was as a starving actor, living rent free in a basement apartment and acting in Off-Off-Broadway. He started writing theater because one of the directors said write something for me. And he discovered he was good at it. Torch Song began as an actual trilogy of full length plays, together running over five hours. Fierstein shortened it to four hours when performed as a set, and to two hours when the movie was made. I haven’t seen the movie and it’s now on my watch list. He wrote the first of the plays in 1977 and the combined version was on Broadway in the early 1980s. I saw Newsies when a tour came to Detroit and I enjoyed it. Same for Kinky Boots. I saw La Cage a year ago at the Stratford Festival in Canada and thought it delightful. I saw Casa Valentina in a local Detroit production in 2018, and again very much enjoyed it. It’s the story of men who go to a resort in the Catskills in the 1960s so they can spend the weekend dressed as women. I wrote about it here. Fierstein’s description of each show includes the process of creating it. Sometimes it goes smoothly, many times it doesn’t. He explains how to get from idea to actors on stage with an audience. When a show doesn’t go well he explains how it gets fixed. Fierstein introduces us to Richie Jackson, the man who became his assistant, agent, and manager. He describes Jackson as seeing Torch Song as a teen whose mother said if he ever came out she would not treat him like the mother in the show did. I recognized Jackson from his book, Gay Like Me, A Father Writes to His Son where he told that story and knew that Jackson was the husband in the book Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man, by BD Wong. Only now do I see I misspelled Jackson’s first name in both of those earlier posts, adding a “t”. Jackson was the power behind a revival of Torch Song in 2017 because it had meant so much to him as a teen. This time Fierstein was too old to be in the cast. But while watching it he felt a big difference. It wasn’t dangerous. When first on Broadway the concept of a drag queen wasn’t well known and felt scary. The audience was mostly straight people and the gay people who attended were afraid of being outed. The cast was afraid of the vice squad waiting in the wings to handcuff them at the end of the show. The gay character at the center of the show wanting the same kind of life as his parents – spouse and kids – was seen as reactionary. All that gave the show an undercurrent of danger. In 2017, 35 years later everyone knew what a drag queen was. The audience was mostly LGBTQ people and rightly assumed the theater was a safe space where they could be totally out. The cast knew they would not damage their career by playing gay (and most were gay). That a gay character would want the same life as his parents was seen as normal. The show had lost its danger. The radical ideas had come true. I very much enjoyed the book. Fierstein is a fine writer and his story is a fascinating and compelling one. Yesterday I wrote about a cartoon that compared the funeral of Nazi Horst Wessel to the funeral of Charlie Kirk. I listen to About Time, the afternoon classical music show on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation hosted by Tom Allen. The show has a Thursday series on stories and music between 1872 (after Germany invaded Paris) and 1939 (just before Germany invaded Paris again). And today’s episode was about Horst Wessel. The time was the late 1920s. Because France demanded Germany pay ruinous reparations for the damage of the Great War, Germany’s economy was in a shambles and inflation was quite high, so high that no one could make economic plans. The future of young men like Wessel was bleak. He joined the Nazi party. Under the guidance of Goebbels, the chief Nazi propagandist, Wessel became a street fighter in Berlin, fighting Communist youth, also looking for a way out of the economic collapse. In 1930 Wessel’s landlady was Communist. She told the Communist street fighters Wessel was behind in his rent. The fighters pulled him from the apartment and beat him. He lived another six weeks, dying from sepsis. Even before he died Goebbels was already capitalizing on his death, turning him into a Nazi martyr. The funeral, as I mentioned yesterday, was a major propaganda event with, I think, 30,000 attending. There was praise for Wessel and what a fine Nazi he was along with a lot denunciation of leftists. By the time the Nazis came to power in 1933 nearly all Nazis knew of Wessel – or at least of the myth created around Wessel. Wessel did write the words (set to a borrowed tune) that became a Nazi anthem. Allen did not play that anthem, but did play a parody Spike Jones created in 1943. Spike Jones was famous for his parodies of classical music. Allen also played Berlin cabaret songs of the 1920s and ‘30s and several pieces by Richard Wagner, who was a favorite of the Nazis. My friend and debate partner sent me an article about Climate Trace, an organization that displays pollution and greenhouse gas data for the world. They base their maps on satellite and remote sensing equipment. They are able to display what the source of the pollutants are – oil refining, manufacturing, transportation, and many other sectors. So I tried it and looked at sites around Detroit. First, the site can really bog down my browser. Second, it showed a site rather close to my house. Once I managed to click on it (the dot was small) I was given data for a place that doesn’t exist. And third, though the article on CNN that my friend sent me says this is a new way to look at things, back in 2021 I wrote about a similar map put out by ProPublica. That one was much easier to use and I didn’t find any false data.