His own Pulitzer: out playwright Doug Wright reflects on winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his Broadway hit I Am My Own Wife.

The day after he won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Doug Wright was still feeling a bit giddy: "I keep calling my boyfriend every two hours and saying, 'I still have my Pulitzer!' I keep waiting to wake up from a dream. It's especially gratifying and exhilarating for someone who grew up with all of the ambivalence one has about one's sexuality, because this award sanctions my most overt and openly gay work."

Wright, best known for the play and film Quills, received the Pulitzer for his current Broadway hit, I Am My Own Wife. The solo show--performed by actor Jefferson Mays and directed by Moises Kaufman (The Laramie Project)--grew out of interviews Wright conducted with Charlotte yon Mahlsdorf, a transgendered German, biologically mate, who lived a singular life as a woman through the Nazi era and the Communist regime that followed.

"When I first met Charlotte I wanted to write a real hymn to her," the playwright explains. "I thought that all the negative conditioning I had endured as a young gay man growing up in Texas was countered by her own extraordinary, stories of survive. But the more closely I scrutinized her life, the less heroic she appeared and the morn painfully human. I felt in the end the best tribute I could give her was to write about her with all of her complexity intact."

Von Mahlsdoff died at age 74 two years ago, but "Granny Trannie," as Wright affectionately calks his eccentric heroine, is still entertaining audiences on Broadway, and there's an international tour already in the works. Ultimately, the play is about Wright as well: "I feel that this is the story of a gay playwright searching for his own history, which takes him across the ocean into the arms of an East German transvestite."