When your mother came to see the first part of ‘Torch Song’ in La MaMa in 1978, she noticed that you were wearing earrings that she had missed.
When I got into drag early on, I grabbed a lot of her jewelry. When I took my jewelry class with Pratt, where I went to college, I gave her everything I made.
You felt supported by your parents, didn’t you?
My father grew up in an orphanage. He instilled in me and my brother that all you have is your family, and that he would always be behind us. I’m sure he and my mom had a lot of sleepless nights talking about what I was up to, wearing dresses, whatever. My brother once told Lesley Stahl in an interview that never aired, “Harvey was just always Harvey. We always accepted him as Harvey.”
So how did your mom react to those early plays that were soft, but also sassy?
First, she loved the theater and took me every chance she got as a child. And she knew my boyfriends and stuff. She was not innocent.
It’s a different world now. When you wrote your trilogy, gay couples didn’t have children very often.
But at that time, all these gay kids were thrown out of their homes and beaten up in group homes. And so there was a need for us to go beyond our own needs as individuals and become this community and take care of our children. My mother was a teacher in New York City and we argued about the Harvey Milk school for gay children. She told me if you don’t mainstream these kids now, they’ll never have a life. Then she had a gay student and suddenly she changed her mind.
You reference LGBTQLMNOP in your book. Could you be canceled for being slippery?
No, because everyone knows that we are an ever-growing group. When I was a kid, I thought there were gays and straights, and everyone else was in the closet. Growing up, I started to realize that there are many colors in our chalk box. The men in my play “Casa Valentina” were based on real straight transvestites in the 1950s, and none of them agreed on anything. The big lie is that we are all the same. Neither of us is like the other. We are all so beautifully individual.
