Tony award-winning actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein (“Kinky Boots,” “Torch Song Trilogy”), sounded off to The Hollywood Reporter this week on Russia’s anti-gay laws, and Orson Scott Card, author of “Enders Game.”
The interview came just one day after a searing op-ed in The New York Times in which Fierstein compared Russian President Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws to “Hitler’s campaign against the Jews.”
“Mr. Putin’s campaign against lesbian, gay and bisexual people is one of distraction, a strategy of demonizing a minority for political gain taken straight from the Nazi playbook,” wrote Fierstein.
And to The Hollywood Reporter, he added:
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
There’s only one way to change somebody like Putin and that’s in the pocketbook. You can’t get him with angry words. He feeds on that and his followers feed on that. You make the West angry, they’re thrilled. You can’t get them that way. You can’t get them through a U.N. sanction: “Oh boy, the U.S. is mad at me. I’m shaking all the f–k over.”
There’s only one way and that’s in the pocketbook. You hurt them in the pocketbook, they shut the fuck up and back the fuck down.
LGBT activists this week launched a boycott of Russian vodka in response to Russia’s anti-gay legislation and increased violence against LGBT citizens in Russia.
On anti-gay activist and former board member of the National Organization for Marriage, Orson Scott Card, Fierstein said:
Look at that asshole [Orson Scott Card] that wrote this new Harrison Ford movie [Ender’s Game]. I think that you can have any opinion you want, but at least be willing to take the consequences of your opinion. It’s like, ‘Well, I hope that people will be more understanding,’ or what did he say? ‘More tolerant of my views.’
The quotes that got me about him weren’t against gay marriage — he wanted homosexuality criminalized in the United States. That’s what he called for. You want me to be tolerant of you wanting to criminalize homosexuality? Fuck you on your grave, you piece of shit.
Fierstein’s op-ed in The New York Times is here, and his interview with The Hollywood Reporter is here.
