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For theater lovers, Fierstein bio a feast of memories

It’s also the story of a queer hero

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Harvey Feirstein (Photo courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf)

‘I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir’
By Harvey Fierstein
c.2022, Alfred A. Knopf
$30/383 pages

One night when “Torch Song Trilogy” first ran on Broadway, playwright, screenwriter, actor, gay rights advocate and four-time-Tony-winner Harvey Fierstein recalls in his sparkling memoir “I Was Better Last Night,” he went to his dressing room after a performance. There, Fierstein, 67, found theater legend Ethel Merman. “Oh, Miss Merman, I am one of your most devoted fans,” Fierstein said to Merman, “I’m so honored you came to see the show. Please, I’m dying to know what you thought.”

“I thought it was a piece of shit,” Merman told Fierstein, “But the rest of the audience laughed and cried, so what the fuck do I know?”

For lovers of theater, queer and hetero, “I Was Better Last Night” is a feast of memories.

For LGBTQ folk who lived through the early AIDS epidemic, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ – the fight for marriage equality – the memoir is the story of a queer hero.

It’s the tale of an icon who makes you laugh, cry and get angry (at homophobia).

The memoir is written in 59 short chapters. Reading it is like eating pistachios. Eat one, and you can’t stop.

Once you start “It Was Better Last Night,” be prepared to let the vacuuming go, the bills to go unpaid, so you can burn the midnight oil.

Listing even a few of Fierstein’s multitudinous credits is exhausting! Fierstein is a Renaissance man who’d give Leonardo da Vinci a run for his money.

He’s sung “Everything’s Coming Up Noses” with the Muppets on “Sesame Street,” appeared as Mrs. Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, played Robin Williams’ brother Frank in the movie “Mrs. Doubtfire,” was nominated for an Emmy for his appearance on “Cheers,” voiced Yao in “Mulan” and played the iconic Edna Turnblad in the musical “Hairspray.”

Before “Will and Grace,” Fierstein, as he notes in the memoir, was the “first openly gay actor to play an openly gay on a sitcom.”  

Fierstein came out when you could be arrested for holding hands with someone of the same-sex. While in his 20s, he wrote and performed in the pioneering and renowned “Torch Song Trilogy.” It was the first (or one of the first) play to feature gay characters who weren’t ashamed of being queer. Words can’t describe how transformative, even lifesaving, “Torch Song” has been  for generations of queers.

“What’s run in the mill today,” Fierstein writes, “was run for the hills” back in the day.

Without succumbing to self-pity, Fierstein describes the homophobia and gender-stereotyping that permeated the culture during his youth and young adulthood.

Fierstein’s mother loved his cousin Sheldon, who was known as the “queer.” Yet, Sheldon’s queerness wasn’t talked about.

In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in second grade, Fierstein was cast as the king in “Sleeping Beauty” because of his theatrical “flair.” But this wasn’t for him. Fierstein wanted to be the witch because, the “Witch gets green skin, red lips, and long black fingernails,” he writes, “give me lipstick or show me the exit!”

Fierstein’s coming out story is gut-wrenching. His account of his friend Harvey being gay-bashed is terrifying. 

Fierstein speaks bluntly about the straight community’s homophobia at the height of the AIDS epidemic. “I have never been able to shake the feeling that the heterosexual community at large let us die,” he writes. “They wished us well, then turned their backs, issuing sighs of relief that they had nothing to worry about.”

There’s lots of glam, glitz, Tony Award ceremonies and celebrity in “I Was Better Last Night.” One night, Fierstein recounts, after he partied with Debbie Reynolds at Backstage, one of his favorite hangouts, he heard on the news that Reynolds may have had a heart attack. “Don’t worry,” he told Reynolds’ daughter Carrie Fisher, “it’s a hangover.”

But the memoir is far from a vacuous ego-boost. Fierstein writes with raw honesty about his alcoholism (his long “love affair” with Southern Comfort), his heart surgery and his regrets.

Reading “I Was Better Last Night” is like seeing a fabulous Broadway play on opening night.

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Books

Examining importance of queer places in history of arts and culture

‘Nothing Ever Just Disappears’ shines with grace and lyrical prose

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(Book cover image courtesy of Pegasus Books)

‘Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories’ 
By Diarmuid Hester
c.2024, Pegasus Books
$29.95/358 pages

Go to your spot.

Where that is comes to mind immediately: a palatial home with soaring windows, or a humble cabin in a glen, a ramshackle treehouse, a window seat, a coffeehouse table, or just a bed with a special blanket. It’s the place where your mind unspools and creativity surges, where you relax, process, and think. It’s the spot where, as in the new book “Nothing Ever Just Disappears” by Diarmuid Hester, you belong.

Clinging “to a spit of land on the south-east coast of England” is Prospect Cottage, where artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman lived until he died of AIDS in 1994. It’s a simple four-room place, but it was important to him. Not long ago, Hester visited Prospect Cottage to “examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture.”

So many “queer spaces” are disappearing. Still, we can talk about those that aren’t.

In his classic book, “Maurice,” writer E.M. Forster imagined the lives of two men who loved one another but could never be together, and their romantic meeting near a second-floor window. The novel, when finished, “proved too radical even for Forster himself.” He didn’t “allow” its publication until after he was dead.

“Patriarchal power,” says Hester, largely controlled who was able to occupy certain spots in London at the turn of the last century. Still, “queer suffragettes” there managed to leave their mark: women like Vera Holme, chauffeur to suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst; writer Virginia Woolf; newspaperwoman Edith Craig, and others who “made enormous contributions to the cause.”

Josephine Baker grew up in poverty, learning to dance to keep warm, but she had Paris, the city that “made her into a star.” Artist and “transgender icon” Claude Cahun loved Jersey, the place where she worked to “show just how much gender is masquerade.” Writer James Baldwin felt most at home in a small town in France. B-filmmaker Jack Smith embraced New York – and vice versa. And on a personal journey, Hester mourns his friend, artist Kevin Killian, who lived and died in his beloved San Francisco.

Juxtaposing place and person, “Nothing Ever Just Disappears” features an interesting way of presenting the idea that both are intertwined deeper than it may seem at first glance. The point is made with grace and lyrical prose, in a storyteller’s manner that offers back story and history as author Diarmuid Hester bemoans the loss of “queer spaces.” This is really a lovely, meaningful book – though readers may argue the points made as they pass through the places included here. Landscapes change with history all the time; don’t modern “queer spaces” count?

That’s a fair question to ask, one that could bring these “hidden” histories full-circle: We often preserve important monuments from history. In memorializing the actions of the queer artists who’ve worked for the future, the places that inspired them are worth enshrining, too.

Reading this book may be the most relaxing, soothing thing you’ll do this month. Try “Nothing Ever Just Disappears” because it really hits the spot.

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Books

Upcoming books offer something for every reader

From a history of the gay right to a look at queer women’s spaces

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(Book cover images courtesy of the publishers)

Daylight Savings Time has arrived, giving you more sunlight in the evening and more time to read. So why not look for these great books this spring?

If your taste runs to historical novels, you’re in luck. When Yorick spots his name on the list of the missing after the Titanic sinks, he believes this to be an omen: nobody’s looking for him, so maybe this is his opportunity to move to Paris and open that bookstore he’s been dreaming about. In The Titanic Survivors Book Clubby Timothy Schaffert (Doubleday, $29.00) his decision leads to more than a bucolic little business. Out April 2.

If you’re looking for something a little on the lighter side, discover Riley Weaver Needs a Date to the Gaybutante Ball by Jason June (HarperTeen, $19.99). Young adult books are perfect light reading for adults, and this one is full of high-school drama, romance, comedy, and more drama. What fun! Out May 23.

Can’t get enough of graphic novels? Then look for Escape from St. Hell: A Graphic Novel by Lewis Hancox (Graphix, $14.99). It’s the continuing story of Lew, who just wants to live his life as a guy, which he started doing in the last novel (“Welcome to St. Hell”) but you know what they say about one door closing, one door opening. In this new installment, Lew grapples with the changes he’s made and how his friends and family see things, too. This book is fresh and honest and great for someone who’s just transitioned. Out May 7.

For the mystery lover, you can’t go wrong with Clean Kill: A Nicky Sullivan Mystery by Anne Laughlin (Bold Strokes, $18.95). As the manager of a sober living home in Chicago, Nicky Sullivan has her hands full with 10 other residents of the home. But when one of them is murdered, Sullivan reaches back into her past as an investigator to find the killer by calling on her old partner. Fortunately, he’s still working. Also fortunately, he’s got a new partner and she catches Sullivan’s eye. Can love and murder mix? Out May 14.

Can’t get enough of politics? Then you’ll be happy to find Coming out Republican: A History of the Gay Right by Neil J. Young (University of Chicago Press, $30). In the fractious political atmosphere we have now, it’s essential to understand how gay conservatives have influenced politics through the decades. Find this book before November. It may be one of the most eye-opening books you’ll read. Out April 3.

The reader who loves her “space” will want to take A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture by June Thomas (Seal Press, $30) there to read. It’s a book about historically safe places for queer women to be themselves – and some are surprisingly very public. Interviews with iconic feminists and lesbians round out a great look at the locales that queer women have claimed for their own. Out May 28.

And now the housekeeping: Release dates can change and titles can be altered at the last minute, so check with your favorite bookseller or librarian. They’ll also have more recommendations if you need them because there’s a lot of time for reading now.

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Books

Gay author takes us on his journey to fatherhood in ‘Safe’

One man’s truth about the frustrations and rewards of fostering

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(Book cover image courtesy of Atria Books)

‘Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family’
By Mark Daley
c.2024, Atria Books
$28.99/304 pages

The closet is full of miniature hangers.

The mattress bumpers match the drapes and the rug beneath the tiny bed. There’s a rocker for late-night fusses, a tall giraffe in the corner, and wind-up elephants march in a circle over the crib. Now you just need someone to occupy that space and in the new book, “Safe” by Mark Daley, there’s more than one way to accomplish that dream.

Jason was a natural-born father.

Mark Daley knew that when they were dating, when he watched Jason with his nephew, with infants, and the look on Jason’s face when he had one in his arms. As a gay man, Daley never thought much having a family but he knew Jason did – and so, shortly after their wedding, they began exploring surrogacy and foster-to-adopt programs.

Daley knew how important it was to get the latter right: his mother had a less-than-optimal childhood, and she protected her own children fiercely for it. When Daley came out to her, and to his father, he was instantly supported and that’s what he wanted to give: support and loving comfort to a child in a hard situation.

Or children, as it happened. Just weeks after competing foster parenting classes and after telling the social worker they’d take siblings if there was a need, the prospective dads were offered two small brothers to foster.

It was love at first sight but euphoria was somewhat tempered by courts, laws, and rules. Their social worker warned several times that reunification of the boys with their parents was “Plan A,” but Daley couldn’t imagine it. The parents seemed unreliable; they rarely kept appointments, and they didn’t seem to want to learn better parenting skills. The mother all but ignored the baby, and the child noticed.

So did Daley, but the courts held all the power, and predicting an outcome was impossible.

“All we had was the present,” he said. “If I didn’t stay in it, I was going to lose everything I had.” So was there a Happily-Ever-After?

Ah, you won’t find an answer to that question here. You’ll need to read “Safe” and wear your heart outside your chest for an hour or so, to find out. Bring tissues.

Bring a sense of humor, too, because author and founder of One Iowa Mark Daley takes readers along on his journey to being someone’s daddy, and he does it with the sweetest open-minded open-heartedness. He’s also Mama Bear here, too, which is just what you want to see, although there can sometimes be a lot of tiresome drama and over-fretting in that.

And yet, this isn’t just a sweet, but angst-riddled, tale of family. If you’re looking to foster, here’s one man’s truth about the frustrations, the stratospheric-highs, and the deep lows. Will your foster experiences be similar? Maybe, but reading this book about it is its own reward.

“Safe” soars and it dives. It plays with your emotions and it wallows in anxiety. If you’re a parent, though, you’ll hang on to every word.

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