The theatre legend talks his feelings on Trump, the fall of the Kennedy Center and why he finds it hard to trust straight men
Harvey Fierstein is sitting here bleeding to death, he announces. “I got taken down by a rose bush earlier,” the playwright, actor and activist explains in his gloriously gravelly voice. “It could have been a raspberry bush. Gardening is much more dangerous than quilting.”
It is one aside among many during a discursive interview with the Guardian that includes his fears of fascism in America, why heterosexual men are a “bunch of assholes” and the time he sat with Donald Trump at a gay wedding.
But first there is quilting. Fierstein began about 20 years ago, inspired by craft shows on the HGTV channel that he fondly recalls as “hot glue heaven”, and made about a quilt a year. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and, with “nobody else to talk to”, he turned to his sewing machine in earnest and found a new community in a local quilt shop. He is now up to about 80 or 90 quilts.
“I started experimenting more and more and found that people like quilts a lot better than paintings,” Fierstein, 73, observes via Zoom from his home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. “If you give somebody a painting they have to hang it on the wall if you come over for dinner. But at least the dog can sleep on the quilt.”
