Torch Song Trilogy June 1982: the first Tony-winning smash to focus on gay lives, warts and all, opens the door for future gay projects and for out playwrights such as Charles Busch. (Telling our stories).

Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy was a theatrical phenomenon that defied all odds. Who could have imagined that a nearly four-hour comedy-drama about a warm-hearted drag queen's creation of a surrogate family would run three years on Broadway? Or that it would go on to win the 1983 Tony award for Best Play as well as a Best Actor Tony for its flamboyant writer and star, Harvey Fierstein?

At the height of the post-Stonewall clone era, Harvey challenged both gay and straight audiences to champion an effeminate gay man's longings for love and family. Harvey's creation Arnold Beckoff, for once, wasn't a eunuch-like side-kick, but the hero of his own story. He was a fully realized character who had an active sex life, a tragic love story, and a gay teenage foster son. Had there ever been a gay youth depicted on a Broadway stage? Has there been one since?

All of the familiar stereo-types were turned upside down. Arnold's mother, who hitherto would have been the star of the play, was now a comic villain. However, through Harvey's great sense of inclusion, by the end of the play, we also came to understand her confusion and pain.

Audiences found themselves sympathizing with a gay man mourning the death of his lover. Torch Song paved the way for all the plays that shortly afterward would explore the scourge of AIDS in the gay community.

The play's critical and commercial success led directly to the musical La Cage aux Folles, with its book by Harvey Fierstein. Two decades later, television's Will & Grace, with its cozy middle-class depiction of campy gay characters, can trace its ancestry to Arnold Beckoff and company.

Mainstream acceptance of the uncompromising Torch Song Trilogy allowed aspiring gay playwrights to no longer feel foolish fantasizing that their work might one day be produced on a Broadway stage. Harvey Fierstein's play gave the public a vision of gay life that was outrageous yet completely accessible. And it gave all of us gay people toiling in the theater the possibility of unlimited dreams.

Busch wrote the Tony award-nominated The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, the play and film Psycho Beach Party (in which he also appeared), and the upcoming film Die, Mommie, Die!