Macy’s Gives a Thanksgiving Wink to ‘Gay’ Activism 12/1/2003
By Martha Kleder
Parade float featured actor Harvey Fierstein in a flaming red dress.
Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller” may have been too controversial for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but depicting Mrs. Santa Claus as a man in a red dress apparently is not.
Tony-award winner Harvey Fierstein wore a flowing red dress as part of the cast of Hairspray in Thursday’s spectacle, and boasted about it in a catty column the day before in The New York Times:
Tomorrow, to the delight of millions of little children (not to mention the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court), the Santa in New York’s great parade will be half of a same-sex couple. And guess who the other half will be? Me! Harvey Fierstein … dressed in holiday finery portraying the one and only Mrs. Claus.
Won’t America get a kick out of that? But what if Santa really was gay? Could there be another Mr. Claus? Would those grinches who, as we speak, are fashioning legislation to deny marriage to gay and lesbian Americans, make an exception for the jolly old soul?
… As we approach the holiday season I’d like to imagine that fear and bigotry will not prevail in this land.
According to the program on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade web site, Mr. Fierstein was to appear with the cast of the Broadway musical Hairspray on its own float, which he did. Meanwhile, parade officials told Bloomington, Indiana’s North High School marching band that they could not play “Thriller” by Indiana native Michael Jackson, who is facing child molestation charges in California.
Despite Mr. Fierstein’s in-your-face proclamation that he is “Mrs. Claus,” he was not Macy’s official Mrs. Claus, said Macy’s director of publicity, Elina Kazan.
“The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is not a platform for social or political issues. What Mr. Fierstein wrote [in The New York Times] is incorrect and misleading,” Kazan told Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute (CFI) the day before the parade, from the balloon-inflation site. “He will be playing his Hairspray character Mrs. Turnblat, dressed in a Mrs. Claus outfit. He will be with the cast of Hairspray on their own float.”
“The real Mrs. Claus will be on the float with Santa,” she added. That float is traditionally the last feature of the Macy’s annual parade.
“I don’t know which is worse – Macy’s acquiescing to Fierstein’s in-your-face activism, or the Times, which used to be the nation’s paper of record, running his pro-homosexual tripe as ‘commentary,’” said Robert Knight, director of CFI. “There’s plenty of shame to go around in New York this Thanksgiving.”
For those who would like to send their respectfully worded comments to Macy’s, the e-mail address for Miss Kazan is
elina.kazan@fds.com.
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