“Widows and Children First!” premiered that fall. By the time his second installment, “Fugue in a Nursey”, followed in the winter of 1979, it was part of a stated trilogy. The “trilogy” began as a single one-act play, “The International Stud”, written by and starring a 23-year old Harvey Fierstein in the basement of the East Village’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1978. I later had the chance to see an excellent production at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre in 2013, starring a then-unknown Brandon Uranowitz, and kept wondering when the play would come back to New York. My young, gay eyes were transfixed, and there was no turning back. I had seen the Hollywood glitzed “The Birdcage” and “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar”, but the game changer was the 1988 film adaptation of Harvey Fierstein’s masterpiece, landmark play, the intimate “Torch Song Trilogy”. As a closeted-tween, happening upon that marathon coupled the excitement of finding King Tut’s Tomb with the revelation of peering through the looking glass to discover a world in which people like me existed. That was before the network made the jump to low-rent reality programming and still harbored an outsider focus on performing arts, drama, and independent film. One summer in the late 1990s, I stumbled across a late-night marathon of gay movies on Bravo.
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