Harvey Fierstein on the History of Blowjobs

Fashion Week proves wearing, even to us model citizens

Comments (0) By Michael Musto Tuesday, Feb 5 2008

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Marriage was also center stage when the Broadway musical A Catered Affair launched its online family wedding album at Sky360 by Delta, where they have several rows of airplane seats that sit on the tarmac forever, just like at JFK. Harvey Fierstein—the show's writer/co-star and "the original original"—was there to greet fans ("Thanks, cookie," he told one super-nerd who's still excited by Independence Day) and gab it up with press like me while patiently sitting in a Delta seat.

"I didn't just take the movie and put it on the stage," said Harvey the adapter. "Why bother? That's not what I do. I'm an artist. It's like finding something on the street and making a sculpture out of it." As opposed to a paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa. This little sculpture has Harvey as a gay uncle with a special friend, "and everybody knows, but nobody talks about it." That's not too outrageous—my family's still like that. "I wanted to make it inevitable that by now we'd want gay marriage," explained Harvey. "We live in families. We're all in this together. I wanted that undercurrent."

photo: Cary Conover

Harvey Fierstein and Matthew Scott in a catered affair for A Catered Affair

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Some critics feel that such comfortable gays didn't exist in the 1950s, when the kitchen-sink musical is set. "No, they were invented by Susan Sarandon on Sheridan Square in 1964," deadpanned Harvey in his intoxicating rasp. "One day she said, 'I need a friend.' A fairy godmother came down and said, 'You need fairies!' And that's when gays were invented!" "Really? Is that, perchance, when Susan started going out with David Bowie?" I wondered. "I'm not getting into that," he evaded, sagely.

"But really," Harvey continued, loving this, "nobody sucked cock until 1964. There's a plaque on a truck on West Street saying, 'The first dick ever was sucked here'—and that's when homosexuality was born! I'm sure Leonardo DaVinci was just confused. Plato was going through a phase. Oscar Wilde was just trying to be different." And Liberace was just using penises as a colonic.

Anyway, see ya on Broadway, cookie. Now I'm off to get a new big black thing.

musto@villagevoice.com