Arnold is a gay man working as drag queen in 1971 NYC. He meets a handsome bisexual man.

Tony Award-winning actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein re-creates his role as the unsinkable Arnold Beckoff in this film adaptation of the smash Broadway play TORCH SONG TRILOGY. A very personal story that is both funny and poignant, TORCH SONG TRILOGY chronicles a New Yorker's search for love, respect and tradition in a world that seems not especially made for him. From Arnold's hilarious steps toward domestic bliss with a reluctant school teacher, to his first truly promising love affair with a young fashion model, Arnold's greatest challenge remains his complicated relationship with his mother. But armed with a keenly developed sense of humor and oftentimes piercing wit, Arnold continues to test the commonly accepted terms of endearment--and endurance--in a universally affecting story that confirms that happiness is well worth carrying a torch for.—Michael Braem

Arnold, a famous drag queen, tragically lost his lover Alan in a hate crime Alan tried to prevent. Arnold is now torn between his memories on Alan, his bisexual lover Ed, their new adopted teenage gay son David and Arnold's never quite satisfied mother.

Tells largely of the love as opposed to sex life of insecure New Yorker, gay female impersonator Arnold Beckoff, in three distinct acts covering the 1970s, and which is mirrored by the torch songs performed by his drag queen persona, Virginia Ham. Those insecurities are due to a combination of being gay, not being traditionally handsome and thus believing he being out of the league of the "pretty boys", and the Jewish guilt heaped on him by his parents, especially his overbearing mother who loves him but doesn't love the fact of him being gay. While monogamous in relationships with who he believes he is in love, the presentation of the two men in his love life intertwines over these three time periods. The first is Ed Reese, a bisexual schoolteacher who picked Arnold up in a gay bar. The question becomes not only if they can overcome the outward issues between them, Ed being a farm boy at heart, but if Ed is willing to embrace the same-sex side of his sexuality, which up until Arnold was largely "slumming". The second is Alan Simon, a much younger well-off model who saw Arnold perform as Virginia and the two who only got together by chance. Despite the difference in their age and Alan being one of those proverbial pretty boys, especially in being a model, their outward outlook on life is much closer, including their stated individual goal of wanting to have children.—Huggo