Aging & Wisdom Quote by Harvey Fierstein

Fierstein doesn’t dress this up in theory; he plants a flag in the plainest language of fairness: equal rights aren’t a special request, they’re the baseline. The opening move, “To me,” matters. It frames equality not as an abstract doctrine but as lived experience, the kind of gut-level logic you can say at a dinner table and still mean on a picket line. “If a heterosexual has a right to do it” collapses the usual maze of culture-war qualifiers into a single comparison: same act, same standard, same freedom. The bluntness is the point; it refuses the polite euphemisms that once kept gay life discussable only at arm’s length.

Then he pivots from entitlement to responsibility. “Gay youth - who are now setting the agenda” is both celebratory and quietly corrective. It acknowledges a generational power shift: younger queer people are less interested in asking permission, more interested in rewriting the terms. That dash carries a bit of theater-kid timing, an actor’s beat that says, catch up. The subtext: elders can’t just congratulate themselves for surviving; they have to follow the lead of those who grew up with different stakes and different tools.

The final line turns solidarity into a moral mirror. If it’s important to them, it has to be important to him, even if his own battles were fought under other headlines. Fierstein is staking out a politics of continuity: rights don’t belong to the people who first demanded them; they belong to whoever needs them next.