![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “Those alterations - Arnold is a homosexual and a professional ‘drag queen’ - are the substance but not the sum of Mr. “At the end of a long, infinitely rewarding evening in the company of Arnold and his family and friends, he confesses with a sigh that he has always wanted exactly the life that his mother has had - ‘with certain minor alterations.’ “Arnold Beckoff, the lonely but far-from-forlorn hero of Harvey Fierstein’s ‘Torch Song Trilogy,’ is a die-hard romantic who takes his heart, soul and fatalism from the 1920s ballads that give the work its title and its tone,” the critic Mel Gussow wrote. Its headline was simple enough: “ Fierstein’s ‘Torch Song.’” But what followed was anything but. On a Sunday morning in the fall of 1981, I was sitting in my fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, flipping through that day’s New York Times, when I was struck by a theater review that ran on one of the far back pages of the news section. ![]()
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