1971: Arnold, a New York City female impersonator, meets Ed, a bisexual schoolteacher, and they fall in love. Ed, however, is uncomfortable with his sexuality and he leaves Arnold for a girlfriend, Laurel.
1973-79: During Christmas, Arnold meets the love of his life, a male model named Alan. They settle down together, later spending a weekend with Ed and Laurel in the country, where their relationship is tested but endures. Eventually, they apply to foster a child together with a view to adoption, and their application is eventually successful and so they move to a bigger apartment. However, on their first night at their new home, Alan is killed in a homophobic attack.
1980: Months later, in the spring of 1980, Arnold's mother comes to visit from Florida, but her visit leads to a long-overdue confrontation. Arnold's mother disapproves of Arnold's homosexuality and his planned adoption of a gay teenage son, David, as well as Arnold's use of their family burial plot for Alan. They have a series of arguments where Arnold demands that she accept him for who he is, insisting that if she can't then she has no place in his life. The following morning, before she returns to Florida, they have a conversation where, for the first time, they seem to understand each other. With both David and Ed in his life, and a successful new career creating his own stage revue, Arnold's life is finally complete.
The soundtrack for Torch Song Trilogy was released on the Polydor label on LP, cassette, and CD on December 8, 1988. The album charted on the jazz charts of industry magazines Billboard and Cashbox. The song "This Time the Dream's On Me" sung by Ella Fitzgerald, which is used several times throughout the film including over the closing credits, was excised from the planned soundtrack album by Norman Granz, Fitzgerald's long-time manager, when he invoked a contractual clause which gave Fitzgerald the right to refuse her material to appear on an album featuring another artist. In actuality, Granz was unhappy with the money offered by the record company, PolyGram Records, for the use of the song in the film and refused permission for its inclusion on the album out of spite. Original music by Peter Matz and contemporary pop tunes such as Rod Stewart's "Maggie May" were used in the film, but not contained on the soundtrack as its producers, Larry L. Lash and Matz, felt they broke the overall "torch song" theme of the album. The track listing is as follows:
Torch Song Trilogy was released on VHS in 1989, and on DVD in May 2004. The DVD version contains an audio commentary track by actor and writer Harvey Fierstein.
Reception
Torch Song Trilogy was generally well received by critics, with reviews from Variety, Time Out, Roger Ebert and Janet Maslin all praising the film. It holds a 71% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 17 reviews. Janet Maslin from The New York Times wrote “Like La Cage aux Folles,Torch Song Trilogy presents a homosexual world that any mother, with the possible exception of Arnold Beckoff’s, would love. Greatly shortened from Mr. Fierstein’s long-running, Tony Award-winning play, the film version emphasizes the lovable at every turn, but the surprise is that it does this entertainingly and well.” Roger Ebert commented “As written and performed by Harvey Fierstein as a long-running stage hit, it was seen as a sort of nostalgic visit to the problems that gays had in the years before the horror of AIDS. The movie has more or less the same focus, but because it’s a movie, it becomes more intimate and intense.”
Awards and nominations
At the 1989 Deauville Film Festival, director Paul Bogart was nominated for the Critics Award and won the Audience Award. The film was also nominated for Best Feature and Fierstein was nominated for Best Male Lead at the Independent Spirit Awards that same year.
