Debuting a year before the Stonewall Riots, The
Boys in the Band was one of the first plays (and, later, films) to portray
gay men and their issues before a mainstream audience. Gay activists quickly
branded the story and its backbiting, self-loathing characters—a relic of
a bygone era. But over the years many have come to appreciate The Boys in
the Band as a documentary of preliberation times, and as more of an
indictment of society’s homophobia than of gay men themselves.
The play, written by Mart Crowley, opened
off-Broadway in April 1968. It was later made into a film—scripted by
Crowley, directed by William Friedkin, and starring the original stage
actors—which premiered in March 1970.
The Boys in the Band centers on a group of
gay friends who gather at Michael’s upscale Greenwich Village apartment to
celebrate Harold’s birthday. Other party guests include Michael’s
sensible friend Donald, lisping interior decorator Emory, Emory’s friend
Bernard (the sole black character), newly divorced schoolteacher Hank, and
Hank’s promiscuous lover, Larry. The men receive an unexpected visit from
Michael’s purportedly straight former college roommate, Alan, who has just
split up with his wife. Finally, “Cowboy” arrives, a beautiful but dumb
hustler hired by Emory as a birthday gift for Harold.
As the men get increasingly drunk, their
good-natured banter turns spiteful. Alan is offended by Emory’s blatantly
queer mannerisms and attacks him, but he seems surprisingly taken with
“straight-acting” Hank. The story climaxes with a game in which each man
must telephone the person who was his greatest love and confess his
feelings. As the show ends, after spending the evening trying to make
everyone else as miserable as himself, Michael suffers an emotional
breakdown.
The Boys in the Band broke new ground as the
first mainstream play, and the first major Hollywood production, to include
a full cast of gay characters and to deal realistically with homosexuality.
Before that time, most films portrayed homosexuals as either clowns or
victims who typically ended up dead or converted to heterosexuality by the
final scene. Both the play and the film enjoyed critical acclaim, despite
the raw language that shocked many heterosexual viewers. The Los Angeles
Times hailed it as “unquestionably a milestone.” Time magazine called
the film a “humane, moving picture,” and Newsweek deemed it a
“landslide of truths.”
But many gay viewers were less pleased,
especially as the social and political climate changed and queers were able
to live more open and proud lives. Gay activists protested both the play and
the film. The Gay Liberation Front at Iowa State University, wrote a
critical letter to the college paper calling it “trash” that
“perpetuates the ignorance of stereotyping and the idiom of the locker
room.”
While some gay critics found the characters
too stereotypical—especially campy Emory—the main complaint concerned
the men’s self-hatred. “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a
gay corpse,” says Michael, who also laments, “If we could just learn not
to hate ourselves quite so very much.”
But the characters in The Boys in the Band
were drawn from real life, and the story reflects an era in which
homosexuality was seen as both a mental illness and a crime. “I knew a lot
of people like those people,” Crowley said in the 1995 documentary The
Celluloid Closet. “The self-deprecating humor was born out of a low
self-esteem, from a sense of what the times told you about yourself.”
Decades after its debut, The Boys in the Band
remains a popular choice for local theater productions, and the film enjoyed
a revival in the mid-1990s. A sequel, The Men from the Boys, also written by
Crowley, premiered in fall 2002. In this play most of the original
characters, plus three younger men, gather at the same apartment 30 years
later for a memorial for Larry, who has died of pancreatic cancer.
Friedkin went on to direct Cruising, with Al
Pacino as an ostensibly straight cop who goes undercover as a gay leatherman
to investigate a series of murders in New York’s S/M bars. As with The
Boys in the Band, gay activists protested the film, claiming it stereotyped
gay men as hedonists and killers.
Today, many regard The Boys in the Band as a
queer classic. While its gay characters struggled with many of the same
personal and social difficulties faced by heterosexuals, their problems were
compounded by the guilt and repression brought on by society’s homophobia.
In the words of the late gay film critic Vito Russo, The Boys in the Band
provided “the best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever
offered in a popular art form.”
Liz
Highleyman is a freelance writer and editor who has written widely on
health, sexuality, and politics.
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