Fisher Priceless

You must’ve had gay friends telling you that it wasn’t possible.
Of course, but I was devastated at that time. I didn’t know what to think, quite honestly. Look, smart people are not always as smart as they’d like to be. I don’t know if I blamed myself for his turning gay, but I believed I drove him away. And what’s more painful — making him gay or driving him away? It’s similar.

How does Bryan feel about the spotlight that your show puts on him? Does he like the attention?
I don’t think he probably likes it that much. I try to keep it down to a dull roar, but some of that material like the stuff about not reading that part of the warning on the label — “I thought it said heavy machinery, not homosexuality!” — it’s just too good. But I try to leave him alone as best I can, and I did offer him the choice of my taking that stuff out.

At the top of your show, you also discuss your dear friend R. Gregory Stevens, a gay Republican political operative who died of a drug overdose in your bed in 2005, and take questions from the audience about the tragedy. On the evening I attended, someone couldn’t see past the perplexing detail that he was both gay and a Republican.
Yes, I say that he was a Republican, which I believe contributed to his death. It’s a shocking story, but it depends on the audience what they ask — whether they focus on the fact that he was gay, a gay Republican, or why he was in my bed. He was more Republican in Washington; when he came out to visit me, the relief was that he didn’t have to pretend as much.

I’ve read that you’ve felt haunted by Greg’s ghost. I’d think a gay ghost would be pretty fabulous to have lurking around.
No, it wasn’t a bad thing. It was amusing. Things started to go off in my house. You know those little boxes that you push the buttons and they go, “Fuck you,” “Eat shit,” “You’re an asshole”? I had one of those, and it would start to go off, on its own, in the middle of the night. So if that wasn’t Greg ... I mean, I don’t think it was [past resident of my Beverly Hills home] Edith Head, do you?

In the September 2009 issue of Out, you participated in its monthly Can I Be Blunt? column by sharing 10 things that gay men should know about straight women. One of those things was, “We don’t really care that John Travolta is gay.” I know you and Travolta go way back, so let’s get really blunt here: Does his legal team have any business demanding Gawker remove a recent post suggesting that he’s given blow jobs?
Wow! I mean, my feeling about John has always been that we know and we don’t care. Look, I’m sorry that he’s uncomfortable with it, and that’s all I can say. It only draws more attention to it when you make that kind of legal fuss. Just leave it be.