I hear Harvey Fierstein’s inimitable rasp as soon as I enter Cotton Candy Fabrics quilt store in Connecticut. The walls are lined with vibrant fabrics and colourful quilts hang from the ceiling. On any given day you’ll probably find the 73-year-old five-time Tony winner here, among a chatty cast of crafty women and gay men.

Fierstein took up quilting in 2009, partly inspired, he says, by his enjoyment of the cable TV show Simply Quilts, but also because of the Names Project Aids Memorial Quilt. It was to be displayed in Washington DC, and he wanted to make panels for two of his close friends who had died of the disease. He has been prolific ever since. He shows me photos of his creations on his phone: an LGBTQ+ rights quilt featuring pink triangles, yellow stars of David – the “Jewish badge” – and Nazi-saluting skeletons; Fierstein with his two dogs; some horny, phallic trees he dreamed about; and an even hornier nude portrait of a young man (an Amazon delivery driver, apparently).

“I donate them, but I don’t sell them,” he says. “In fact, this morning I got a note from a Broadway casting director saying, ‘Could you donate a quilt for my charity this year?’ I wrote back and said, ‘Could you call me in for a job?’”

Many will know Fierstein as the Broadway legend who broke through with his semi-autobiographical play, then film Torch Song Trilogy, starred in the musical Hairspray, and wrote the book for classics such as La Cage aux Folles and Kinky Boots. Others will have first heard his gravelly tones through his 90s voice work – in Mulan and The Simpsons – or enjoyed his comic supporting roles in films such as Mrs Doubtfire and Independence Day. More recently, you may have caught Fierstein taking a stand against Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ rights and artistic freedom. As he put it on Instagram last year, “I have been in the struggle for our civil rights for more than 50 years only to watch them snatched away by a man who actually couldn’t care less.”

Fierstein isn’t performing much these days, “simply because there hasn’t been anything all that interesting to do”, he says. “I’ve been offered a few things – and everything I’ve read just bored the shit out of me.” Instead, he keeps busy with 10-hour days where he is either writing or quilting – or writing about quilting, for a book he’s working on. There’s a new off-Broadway production of La Cage aux Folles coming in June, starring Billy Porter. But before that, a revival of Kinky Boots has just opened in London, starring Strictly’s Johannes Radebe.

Adapted from the 2005 British movie (with music by Cyndi Lauper), the story follows a Northampton man who revives his father’s struggling shoe factory by partnering with a drag queen to manufacture boots for the underserved drag queen market. It premiered in Chicago in October 2012 to great acclaim, winning six Tony awards, and has continued to play around the world ever since. Why does he think the show still resonates today?

“Well, because it’s so human,” Fierstein says. “What I love most about Kinky Boots is a lot of times men get dragged to see musicals – heterosexual men – and they sort of put up with it and they enjoy it or whatever. But Kinky Boots, women love it, but it’s for men.” Ultimately, he says, it is a show about fathers and sons and the challenge of reconciling your parents’ expectations for your life with your own. “Women understand that, but men don’t talk about that stuff.”

Fierstein grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a Jewish household with a “very strong family” – him, his father (a handkerchief manufacturer), mother (later a school librarian) and older brother Ron (also his long-time manager). His mother loved taking the family to Broadway shows. In his room Fierstein would belt out show tunes, pretending to be leading ladies such as Mary Martin, Ethel Merman and Chita Rivera.

He came out inadvertently to his parents when they discovered nude photographs he’d taken of his two friends posing on his mother’s bed. During the ensuing confrontation, his mother expressed anger that they had “raised a queer”, that she couldn’t trust him and that he’d broken her heart. But his parents never told him to stop being gay. There was barely any discussion, he says, just a sort of unspoken acceptance.

As a child, Fierstein was self-conscious about his weight, particularly his “boy boobs” which he would tape up with bandages. When did he finally feel comfortable in his own skin? “Never,” he says. “I think anybody who acts is a chameleon that just never really is comfortable with themselves … they’re much more comfortable hiding inside a character.”

Fierstein attended art school, then Brooklyn’s renowned Pratt Institute, where he studied ceramics. As a teenager he would hang out in New York’s West Village gay scene. It was a time of social unrest (Fierstein wasn’t at the Stonewall riots in 1969 but he was among the crowds the next day), and a time of casual, anonymous sex. When I ask if he ever had any shame around sex, he replies without missing a beat: “You mean not being good at it?” He grins, then shrugs apologetically. “I don’t know what that means.”

Why does he think he was able to shun the self-loathing that can afflict a lot of gay men? “But heterosexuals are self-loathing as well,” he says. “It’s sort of a lesson that you learn. Nobody judges you as badly as you judge yourself. I don’t think that’s just a gay thing. It takes a lot of work to love yourself.” He expected to grow up and experience the same life milestones as those of his straight peers – a long-term relationship, a family. “It wasn’t until I stepped out into the larger world that I found out that people didn’t believe that or understand that.”

By the time Fierstein graduated in 1973, he was enmeshed in the underground theatre scene, having featured in numerous plays, including Andy Warhol’s Pork. Fierstein’s signature gravelly baritone voice emerged early in his career – partly a result of overdeveloped false vocal cords, partly a result of permanent damage from screaming too loudly on stage.

His big break came in 1982 with Torch Song Trilogy, a series of plays he’d been writing and starring in since 1978 that were eventually merged into a single, four-hour epic – about a Jewish drag queen navigating gay life and love. The story mined his own life – his drag queen persona, casual sex, romantic heartbreak, his relationship with his mother – and the play became a symbol for the struggle for gay rights at the time.

Fierstein was promoted as one of the first “openly gay” writers to have commercial success with an “openly gay” play. Torch Song Trilogy ran for an exhausting three years on Broadway, and landed him Tony awards for best play and best lead actor in 1983. Coupled with his follow-up, a musical adaptation of French play La Cage aux Folles, Fierstein was the buzzy new writer in town.

Around this time he was interviewed by the TV journalist Barbara Walters, who grilled him about life as a gay man. Fierstein’s deftly worded responses – delivered with class, heart and charm – have given the interview a long tail on social media. When Walters asks him: “What’s it like to be a homosexual?” he smiles and answers: “What’s it like to be a heterosexual? I don’t know, I’m just a person.” Later, he tells her: “Ten per cent of the world is gay, so you gotta stop with the ‘this is a sickness, this is an abnormality’; this is a normal thing that has gone on through the history of man.”

In the summer of 1982, however, as Fierstein puts it, “Aids slammed into us like a tsunami.” He lost many friends, ex-lovers and boyfriends during the epidemic. He doesn’t have survivor’s guilt, he says. “I had enough friends that lived through it with me. But yeah, it was horrible to watch. I mean, imagine seeing somebody for dinner and then finding out that they took their own life that night.”

It was a terrible time all round, he recalls. “I was surrounded by sick people and politicians were calling it a gay disease … they were talking about putting us in encampments, like Trump’s doing now [to suspected non-US citizens]. That’s the heterosexuals. That’s the first thing they think of: lock everybody up. They don’t think of dealing with the problem. Human beings are the problem.”

Does he dwell on that period of his life? “I go on with my life, but you think about it all the time,” he says. “I have [the ashes of] friends buried in my backyard, you know? It’s hard.”

Through the late 80s and 90s, Fierstein enjoyed a fruitful film and TV career, appearing in a number of Hollywood blockbusters, often in comic supporting roles (including Independence Day and Mrs Doubtfire), or lending his gravelly voice to animated characters (the hot-tempered bruiser Yao in Mulan, an unforgettable cameo as Homer’s assistant Karl in The Simpsons ). Despite early success, not to mention attempts to get a TV sitcom starring Fierstein off the ground, his onscreen career never flourished like it did on Broadway. Which of his film roles does he look back on most fondly? “None,” he whispers, “I couldn’t care less.”

He admits he feels some affection toward Mrs Doubtfire, though, in which he plays Robin Williams’s brother, a makeup artist. Williams had asked Fierstein to do it after watching him get booed off stage at San Francisco’s Castro theatre because of an ill-advised “lesbian fashion do” skit he had hastily put together at a benefit organised by Lily Tomlin (Fierstein had arrived thinking he was just doing introductions). Williams found the whole thing hilarious. “I did Doubtfire because Robin wanted me to do it. And I was thrilled to do it because I loved him so much.”

As Fierstein’s career took off, he developed a problematic relationship with alcohol. He never drank at work but as soon as he got home he would start, and then make destructive “drink and dial” phone calls. By 4pm he would be blackout drunk. “[I was] just checking out,” he says. “Just not being there.” At his lowest point, in 1996, Fierstein attempted suicide. It was the wake-up call he needed to seek help, from both professionals and friends. “I’ve been sober 29 years,” he says.

There was a comeback of sorts in 2002, when Fierstein took on the role of diva laundress Edna Turnblad in the Broadway adaptation of Hairspray, and won another Tony award, for best actor in a musical. The role was a personal milestone, he says: “There’s a sort of mythical thing of when you get sober, it takes five years to get your marbles back.”

If there is a role Fierstein is proudest of, though, it would probably be playing Tevye in the 2004 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, which he joined in 2005. “But that would be true of anyone who plays Fiddler on the Roof,” he says. “It’s one of those roles you’re just so proud that you got to do.”

In the decade that followed, Fierstein worked on numerous successful Broadway adaptations (Newsies, Kinky Boots), original plays (Casa Valentina, Bella Bella) and teleplays (The Wiz Live!, Hairspray Live!), all while performing on stage. Does he still do much drag? “Not at all.” Does he miss it? “Oh my gosh, you’d have to pay me. A lot.” He did revive Torch Song Trilogy in 2018, though, which inadvertently marked how far the LGBTQ+ equality movement had come. “When we first did it [in 1981] the gay people would hide coming in … sort of embarrassed or scared. When they did the revival, they came in like they owned the place.”

In 2025, Fierstein was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Tonys. “It was very touching,” he recalls. “You do go back over, especially, your relationship with the Tony awards. On the other hand, and I say this with love, they did not broadcast any part of my speech.”

Why does he think that was the case?

“Not my business. Could I guess?” He recalls the controversies about his previous acceptance speeches: when Torch Song Trilogy won best play in 1983, writer and producer John Glines made history – and caused a stir – by thanking his “lover” and producer Lawrence Lane. The following year, when Fierstein would win best book of a musical for La Cage aux Folles, “They stood on stage and said: ‘No one repeat the embarrassment of last year.’ So I got out there and I thanked my lover.”

His acceptance speech for this year’s award was gracious and emotional. He thinks the organisers were worried about what he might say, “because of Trump and how much the world hates him. Which I wouldn’t do out of respect for the evening. In my mind, just being an openly gay man-slash-drag queen, getting these kinds of awards is enough of a statement.”

Not that he has held back when it comes to speaking out against injustices, most recently in relation to Trump’s leadership, including his ban on drag performers at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in February 2025. In response, Fierstein said on Instagram: “He attacks free speech. He attacks the free press. He attacks America’s allies. His only allegiance is to himself – the golden calf. My fellow Americans, I warn you – this is NOT how it begins. This is how freedom ENDS!” When the centre’s Trump-appointed interim director Ric Grenell (who is gay) stepped down from the role this March, Fierstein posted on Instagram that he was “moving on to ruin something new” under the “auspices of our...warmongering Maga fool Prez”.

At the end of the interview I’m shown around the store some more. I’m told by Fierstein and the gang that quilting is an art form in which you’re almost always making something meaningful for someone else. He hopes his (potential) book on quilting will help to inspire people.

“The idea is that I try something new every day, and you can try something new every day,” he says. “And some of it’s going to be great and some of it’s going to be terrible. But go out and have fun. There’s no police. Do something with yourself, you know, whatever it is.”

Kinky Boots is at the London Coliseum until 11 July

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.