Although Harvey Fierstein once didn’t like the taste of alcohol, by the mid-’90s, the celebrated Broadway, television and film entertainer was imbibing almost half a gallon of Southern Comfort a day.
“I hadn’t slept in years,” he writes in “I Was Better Last Night” (Knopf), his memoir out March 1. “What I did was pass out … I hadn’t had a solid bowel movement in months. My legs were in pain almost all the time. He also developed gout.
The “Torch Song Trilogy” star writes that he decided to take his own life.
“I think obviously I was depressed, because alcohol will do that to you,” he told The Post in a recent interview from his home in Connecticut.
“In the long run, it takes you down that road to the point where life doesn’t mean anything anymore … I was really there. And I think because of the alcoholism when I came through it, it made everything so much easier cause it was an actual rebirth. I was able to stop smoking, stop drinking, give up my sort of will of what I was doing. It was so dark and deep that it was an easy thing to be reborn.”
The Brooklyn-born actor and writer, 67, also believes that a factor in his depression was surviving the AIDS epidemic, which decimated his peer group in the 1980s and ’90s. He writes that one of the reasons he never contracted the then-deadly virus was because he’d stopped having anonymous sex by the fall of 1981, for the blandest of reasons — he was bored by the mechanics.
“Did I want a [personal] connection? I’m not sure,” he says in the book. “The choice was to stop using sex as another cigarette or another drink, which is how casual sex had become for me. It had become something to do as opposed to something that’s real.”
Asked whether he felt like he dodged a bullet, Fierstein said emphatically: “Oh, f–king absolutely.”
The multiple Tony winner, who wrote the book for the new Broadway production of “Funny Girl,” starring Beanie Feldstein, said that the AIDS crisis “became this sort of slow-action horror film.
“And then all of a sudden you were surrounded,” he recalled. “It was ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ Your friends were walking with canes. Beautiful, beautiful boys were wearing thick makeup over their scars, lines at hospitals. Of course, St. Vincent’s became a big AIDS place in my mind because there were so many priests with AIDS, so where were they gonna go?
“So that only made sense, because a Catholic hospital would become their epicenter. It was in the Village, it was a Catholic place, they could treat priests and keep it quiet. But all the priests I knew were sick.”
Fierstein can’t even count how many people he knew who died of AIDS. “I have no count of the number of people I lost,” he added.
Living through the “gay plague” has made the “Kinky Boots” playwright furious at anti-vaxxers. “Watching people standing on bridges, refusing to get shots and I’m like, ‘You should have been a homosexual in the AIDS crisis and seen what we went through,’” he said. ” You don’t want a f—ing shot? You little piece of s–t.
“Back then we had people screaming, ‘I’m not putting on a condom, we’re not closing down the baths. We fought for these rights to have free sex. This disease was invented to keep us from having sex.’ We had those crazies too, but they were like four or five people. They didn’t fill bridges with them,” he said.
Fierstein struggled for years in the downtown arts scene before writing and starring in “Torch Song Trilogy” in the early ’80s, which also starred a then-unknown Estelle Getty (later Sophia on “Golden Girls”) and a young actor named Matthew Broderick.
These days Fierstein is busier than ever, with multiple projects in the works.
“I’ve got ‘Funny Girl‘ opening on Broadway, we’re doing a workshop of another show of mine, and Nick Kroll is in the process of creating a television show for me,” he said, before noting that he struggled financially for years. In fact, Fierstein said, he felt like he’d made it when he could afford to buy a box of rubber bands rather than scrounging around on the pavement for them.
But the “Hairspray” star sounds a little disappointed with the current crop of aspiring playwrights and directors.
“What we hear right now is these young artists that want their shot at commercial theater,” he said. “They don’t want their shot to create theater. They want jobs that create a lot of money … That’s definitely not the way we were. But it’s their generation. They have the right, right?”
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