Before Harvey Fierstein was the legendary hero of stage and screen we know today, he was another queer kid trying to break into theater in the city. And in between featuring in Andy Warhol’s Pork and other avant garde delights at La Mama, he was logging hours at some of the city’s most fabled—and sadly, long-shuttered—gay bars. One of them even supplied the title for the first of the theater pieces that would become Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy.
In 1977, gay New York was a completely different place. The Everard Baths (aka the EverHard baths, meeting place of Gore Vidal and Howard Austen) were still up and running, and would remain in operation until a 1986 fire shut them down. The meatpacking district was still exactly that, and queer patrons looking to cruise had no shortage of intriguing options.
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In the 1970s, bathhouses were a place for queer men to relax, hook up, and enjoy incredible early career performances by Bette Midler.
In Fierstein’s memoir I Was Better Last Night, he talks about staging his own plays in 1977 and drinking in the bohemian atmosphere of the city. At night, when his friend would go off to Prospect Park in search of cottaging options, “I’d stay in the city, and go off to the Stud, or the Trucks.”
“I remember going into the back room of the Stud one particular February night,” less for ” Fierstein recalls, “drink in one hand, cigarette in another, I felt my way through the crowd.”
Soon enough, Fierstein got lucky. “We began to kiss, we folded into one another’s arms so easily that it felt like two forms manufactured to fit together.”
The Stud was, of course, The International Stud, a cruising spot described by one queer New Yorker in 1969 as: “Leather bar … Seldom do you see silk neckerchieves, or Betty Boop curls, on any of its patrons.” Another reviewer wrote that: “if you ventured into the next room, you were privy to a cluster-fuck of guys engaging in oral sex as if out of a Pasolini film.” Rough trade only need apply! But Fierstein, like probably plenty of men in 1977, wasn’t going there for just a hook up. The Stud provided a way to be with other men in safety in those years—a refuge from the cold where you could find love, sex, and anything else on offer.
The Stud would, of course, go on to become a place of legend thanks to Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, the first installment of which—starting as a monologue about the loneliness and vulnerability of queer encounters—was named after the bar itself.
“Why not use the Stud?” Fierstein realized while writing about the love and heartbreak he experienced after that first hookup at the club. Into the script it went: the first play in the series suddenly had its shape. In between each act, torch songs about lost love would be sung “by Lady Blues, whom [Fierstein’s hero] Arnold imagines himself to be.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
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