How Harvey Fierstein's Bad Sex Led to Good Art

How Harvey Fierstein's Bad Sex Led to Good Art

When Tony Award-winning actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein was growing up in New York City in the 60s, he was surrounded by the beginnings of the gay rights movement, and protest art and avant-garde theater was the norm. "I didn't know that being gay was sad until I got out into the world and they told me that," he said in our interview. "All the gay people I know are really kind of happy." And writing from that lens has informed his work ever since. In his new memoir, I Was Better Last Night, Harvey shares the six year journey to get his breakthrough play, Torch Song Trilogy, on Broadway, and shares other behind the scenes stories from hit Broadway plays like Hairspray, Fiddler on the Roof, and La Cage aux Folles. He also told me about his relationship with his younger brother turned business manager, why he's happily single and sober, and how he thinks he'll be remembered.

Episoder(150)

I Wanted To Be A 'Good Girl'

I Wanted To Be A 'Good Girl'

*This episode originally ran in 2019.  Andrea grew up attending an evangelical church in Texas, where she was taught to abstain from sex until marriage and keep herself sexually "pure." That early sex...

5 Okt 202223min

India Walton: I Knew It Was Gonna Be Tough, But I Didn't Expect it to Get Nasty

India Walton: I Knew It Was Gonna Be Tough, But I Didn't Expect it to Get Nasty

India Walton grew up in Buffalo, New York, a starkly segregated city, where 85 percent of the city's Black residents live on the East Side. She started a family there at 14 and then a career as a nurs...

28 Sep 202245min

Inside John Waters' Home (But Not Inside His Colon)

Inside John Waters' Home (But Not Inside His Colon)

John Waters is the writer and director of such cult classics like Pink Flamingos, Serial Mom, and his biggest mainstream success, Hairspray. He’s been making movies since the 1960s and this year he re...

21 Sep 202232min

How Clothes Help Us Find Our People and Ourselves

How Clothes Help Us Find Our People and Ourselves

For many of us, the last few years of the pandemic has given us time to reflect on different aspects of our identities and how we show up in the world. That's meant more room to explore what silhouett...

14 Sep 202231min

Lucinda Williams Says Whatever the Hell She Wants

Lucinda Williams Says Whatever the Hell She Wants

*This episode originally ran in 2016.  When Lucinda Williams was in elementary school, all the other kids brought rock collections and other standard fare to show-and-tell. But she brought a folder. "...

7 Sep 202230min

Big Freedia Bounces Back

Big Freedia Bounces Back

Even before becoming Big Freedia, Freddie Ross was known around New Orleans. Her "signature call"—an operatic bellow that she lets out when I ask to hear it—was legendary in the city. "They'd be like,...

31 Aug 202226min

Finding Meaning After My Husband's Public Death

Finding Meaning After My Husband's Public Death

When talking about the death of his husband, Terry Kaelber doesn't use the word suicide, "I tend to say he took his own life out of deep distress about the environment through self-immolation." Terry ...

24 Aug 202235min

Knock Knock, Who's There? Bob the Drag Queen

Knock Knock, Who's There? Bob the Drag Queen

If you lived in Columbus, Georgia in the 90s, you might have spent time in a queer club called Sensations. But Bob the Drag Queen knew Sensations by day, not night – she was in elementary school when ...

17 Aug 202230min

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