The theatre legend talks his feelings on Trump, the fall of the Kennedy Center and why he finds it hard to trust straight men

Harvey Fierstein is sitting here bleeding to death, he announces. “I got taken down by a rose bush earlier,” the playwright, actor and activist explains in his gloriously gravelly voice. “It could have been a raspberry bush. Gardening is much more dangerous than quilting.”

It is one aside among many during a discursive interview with the Guardian that includes his fears of fascism in America, why heterosexual men are a “bunch of assholes” and the time he sat with Donald Trump at a gay wedding.

Exclusive: Analysis found that sites previously ranked first can lose up to 79% of traffic if results are displayed below a Google AI Overview

News companies have been warned of a “devastating impact” on online audiences as search results are replaced by AI summaries, after a new study claimed it caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs.

The threat posed by Google’s AI Overviews, which summarise a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of the concerns among media owners. Some regard it as an existential threat to outlets reliant on search result traffic.