It takes a brave man to step back into the stilettos he wore 17 years ago.

Enter John Cameron Mitchell, creator of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” the show that won Neil Patrick Harris a Tony.

“It was very scary at first, but I’m having more fun now than I did back then, because there’s nothing at stake,” says Mitchell, a Texas native who, decades before he first played Hedwig, was the Virgin Mary in a Nativity musical and later studied theater at Northwestern University.

The writer/ director/ actor — whose drag persona looks strikingly like “Six Feet Under” actress Rachel Griffiths — plays the tragic, transgendered rock-and-roller Hedwig through April 26, when Darren Criss takes over.

Here are a few of Mitchell’s favorite books:

Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys by Viv Albertine

This is a shy girl’s point of view as a pop icon — a story of a woman in a very sexist society, London’s punk scene, who literally found a voice after being a guitarist in the band the Slits, the opposite of the Sex Pistols. Beautifully written, it’s not your usual rock-and-roll tell-all. I’ve been talking everyone into reading it.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

The novel is in the form of an annotated poem, and the real story is in the footnotes. It’s held up as one of the great postmodern novels, but you have the sense that Nabokov is having a hoot. It’s a lot gayer than he usually is, with this sad, homosexual deposed king at its center — or a madman pretending to be king.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

For some reason, whenever I’m depressed, reading O’Connor’s stories pulls me out of it. Maybe growing up Catholic gives you the possibility of redemption — all her characters have the potential for that but often fail. I’ve never seen a clearer view of racism as the transfiguration of self-hatred as in her story, “The Artificial Nigger.”

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

This is in the tradition of adult comics like Sandman and Watchman, but I think this exceeds them. Like “The X-Files,” it asks, “What if every conspiracy theory was true?” It has a gang of misfit superheroes. My favorite character’s named Lord Fanny, who’s a Brazilian transwoman in a story called “Apocalipstick.”