Things Change

Harvey Fierstein's I Was Better Last Night is part memoir and part firsthand account of modern gay history

- By H. Alan Scott

If there were a Forrest Gump of modern gay history, it would have to be Tony-award-winning actor and writer Harvey Fierstein. From taking to the streets in the days following the Stonewall riots in 1969 when he was just 15 years old to the gay rights movement of the 1970s to his rise to fame as one of the most prominent (if not the most prominent) out gay voice on Broadway and in Hollywood at the height of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, Fierstein has been there for it all.

“Are you aware when you're living your life, what the perspective is? Of course not,” Fierstein tells Newsweek, reflecting on how his own experience as a young man didn't exactly jibe with the mainstream media idea that all queer people had to be either sad or scary. “I knew something was going on. I knew that my idea of who I was and who the gay people I was meeting didn't match up with what I was being told it was supposed to be, he says. Fierstein reflects on this positive unique queer perspective and more in his new memoir I Was Better Last Night (Penguin Random House). When reading the book, one can't help but hear Fierstein's singular, gravelly voice.

He says he wrote a memoir not to document his part in modern gay history, but because he had time on his hands. “The pandemic hit. I cleared my desk of all the work that I had to do,” he recalls, “My agent said to me, Why don't you write your memoir?' I said no, don't be silly.”

Fierstein says he didn't know how to go about it. “So I asked Shirley MacLaine, who has written like 20 memoirs. She said, trust your memory, memory will be the thing that edits it.