Self-Hatred or Proud History? The Boys in the Band: A Review Essay.

Self-hatred or proud history? The Boys in the Band come back. Out/Look, Summer 1990, pp. 62-67.

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In the summer of 1967, when playwright Mart Crowley sat down to write The Boys in the Band, revolution was the last thing on his mind. Instead, after a series of setbacks in his career, and with the voices of childhood demons loud in his ears, Crowley says, he was “frustrated and angry and confused and just sick of it all! And I just struck out and wrote this play.”

For reasons that may have everything to do with destiny, however, by the time Boys in the Band premiered—in Spring 1968—revolution was just around the corner. After a brief workshop at Vandam Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, Boys in the Band officially opened on April 14, 1968 at Theatre Four, an Off-Broadway house on Manhattan > ’s , where it ran for 1001 performances. On June 27, 1969, just ten weeks after Boys’ second anniversary, Judy Garland died. And that night marked the beginning of the era called Stonewall.

At least partly because of the historical coincidence of Boys in the Band with the Stonewall riots, Crowley’s play was destined ever after to be evaluated in light of the new sensibilities of the liberated homosexual. For that reason, perhaps, Boys in the Band has achieved a unique and divided kind of significance. In the twenty-two years since it appeared on the stage, it has been marked in equal parts by fame and infamy.

Credited with helping to usher in the age of Stonewall, Boys has as often been denounced for setting gay lib back thirty years. While some have counted Crowley’s portrayals of gay men among the most homophobic representations in theatre history, others have applauded Boys as the first play to give genuine dimension to the lives of gay characters. And, in 1989, as if to put a fine point on the debate, the Alyson Almanac gave Boys in the Band top spot on its list of the “Worst Gay Plays of All Time.” Of that distinction, playwright Crowley wryly remarked, “Now they call it a gay play. Once upon a time, it was just a play.”

The Boys in the Band controversies were re-ignited last Winter when San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros mounted a wildly successful revival of Boys on its mainstage. Rhinoceros’s was the first-ever production of Boys by a gay theatre company. But no sooner had Rhinoceros announced the inclusion of Boys in the Band in its 1989-1990 season than angry letters came firing back. In one, printed as part of Rhinoceros’s program note for Boys, the anonymous writer promised never to patronize the theatre again and exhorted, “Return to the gay and lesbian affirmative path blazed by (Theatre Rhinoceros founder) Alan Estes. Shame!”

Shame, indeed. Boys in the Band appeared during an era of tremendous political and social upheaval in America, and at a time when minority consciousness was undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Shame and, in particular, homosexual shame was rapidly going out of style—being aggressively replaced, in fact, by gay pride. By the end of the 1960s, gay life—and gay theatre—had reached a watershed.


By now, thanks in large part to lesbian and gay historians and archivists, we know more than ever about the sociological, demographic, and cultural forces that shaped our pre-Stonewall history. Less well documented is the pre-Stonewall history of gay and lesbian theatre (or, perhaps more accurately, of more-or-less identifiable homosexual characters on the stage)—the kind of hidden-in-plain-sight representation that Vito Russo so admirably analyzed for the cinema in The Celluloid Closet.

One thinks first, of course, of the “homosexuality as dirty secret” school of drama, including such plays as The Children’s Hour (1934), Tea and Sympathy (1953), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958), among many others. These encoded, scandalous depictions of homosexuality often represented little more than what William Hoffman characterized as “winks across the footlights.”

By the mid- to late-1960s, however, the pathetic invert was daring to speak her or his name in person—The Killing of Sister George (1965) and Staircase (1966) come immediately to mind, as do Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1965), Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967), and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Latent Heterosexual (published in 1967 and not, as far as I know, ever produced). Although all of these plays were intended for mainstream audiences, and none of the portrayals of homosexual characters was flattering, they were, at least, a counter to invisibility.

But even that much presence was threatening and, as early as 1961, New York critics were decrying the homosexual encroachment in theatre. Even Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was taken as an emblem of that subversion--the attempt to camouflage a homosexual relationship within a heterosexual one (an interpretation that seems to have occurred to everyone but the playwright).

At the same time, unambiguously affirmative voices were raising themselves in alternative theater, leaving behind for good such portrayals and quasi-portrayals of homosexuals. Between 1958 and 1961, f0r example, playwrights at the Caffe Cino were producing club-style gay theatre for the Greenwich Village art crowd, and Cino became both a catalyst for the post-Stonewall gay theatre movement and a key player in the development of the Off- and Off-Off-Broadway scene—then, much more than today, an exuberant, vital force in American theatre. Some of Cino’s notable descendants include Al Carmines’ Judson Poets’ Theatre, LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, and The Glines.

Cino productions ran heavily toward versions of extant works by Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Genet, and other “gay” writers both ancient and modern. As such, Cino was perhaps better known for its gay sensibility (e.g., its popular drag version of Medea) than for its gay playwrights. Still, the talents of writers such as Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick, and Doric Wilson—to name perhaps the best known Cino graduates—were nurtured there. It was at Cino, in fact, that Lanford Wilson scored his earliest success (and a certain notoriety) with The Madness of Lady Bright (1964).

The second vital force in the growth of theatre produced by and for queer people was Ronald Tavel and John Vacarro’s PlayHouse of the Ridiculous, founded in 1966. The PlayHouse produced Charles Ludlam’s first play, Big Hotel and Tavel’s Gorilla Queen, as well as a series of campy, “low” theatre spectacles before a falling out sent Ludlam off to establish his own famous Ridiculous Theatre.

What is interesting about the plays produced by nascent gay theatres during the 1960s—and particularly the new work that came out of Cino—is that the plays’ themes were not necessarily what would be called “positive” today. Homosexual characters were sometimes suicidal, neurotic, or tormented; promiscuity and exploitative relationships were depicted as a dangerous potential of gay life; the homosexual milieu was often constituted as cross-genderism, sexual innuendo, and a more-or-less romantic fatalism. There were, of course, many exceptions, but the tacit understanding seemed to be that such views of the homosexual subculture might be explored—at least within the “closed circuit” of the gay Greenwich Village theatre-and-cafe crowd. Then, as now, setting made all the difference.


This was the theatre environment in which Boys in the Band made its debut. Significantly, Crowley shepherded his play onto the stage via none of the “gay” avenues available at the time. That chain of events, however, had less to do with any design of Crowley’s than with the professional connections he had formed by that time in his life.

Shortly after graduating from Washington, D.C.’s Catholic University of America, Crowley came to New York to take a position in Elia Kazan’s production company. When Kazan wasn’t filming, Crowley worked as an assistant for other movie crews that were shooting in Manhattan. His credits included pictures such as Butterfield 8, The Fugitive Kind, and Splendor in the Grass, during the course of which Crowley became friends with Natalie Wood. When Kazan’s company went on an extended hiatus during his research for the ill conceived America, America, it was Wood who suggested to Crowley that he move out to Los Angeles to look for work.

Crowley did just that, and picked up regular writing stints in Hollywood through the fateful summer of ‘67. That was the point, he recalls, when life came “crashing down around my ears.” Although Crowley had been delighted by the sale of his first screenplay to 20th Century Fox, the studio abruptly dropped the film in mid-production. A pilot he had written for Bette Davis was shot, but then abandoned by the producers. As a final blow, Crowley was fired from a screenwriting job at Paramount.

By that summer, Crowley recalls, “I was really broke, and very anxious, and emotionally pretty broken, too. I was over 30—and for some reason that seemed to be more depressing than ever. And I thought, oh God, I’ve blown all my chances and nothing is ever going to happen for me again.” As therapy and as a kind of retribution, he began to write Boys.

But writing Boys in the Band proved to be less than half the battle. When friends assured Crowley that the play couldn’t possibly be produced, he hand-carried his script to a agent. He recalls, “She said she would [read the play] only because she owed a favor to the man who sent me there. So I left her office, and about mid-way in the block (I came to) this rundown movie house, playing some Andy Warhol picture. And I went and sat through that while she read the play.”

When Crowley got back to the agent’s office, she “was like a changed woman. She sat at her desk, straightening pencils, and scooping up ashes into little piles and patting them down, and never once looking me in the eye. And she said, ‘I can’t stake my reputation on this. This is like some weekend at Fire Island!’

“By this time,” Crowley says, “I was almost in tears. This really was the end. So, just off the top of my head, I asked, ‘Do you know Richard Barr?’”

Barr and Clinton Wilder, of course, had produced Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s breakthrough drama and the winner of five Tony awards in 1963. Crowley didn’t know Barr, but he thought that “anybody who produced Virginia Woolf certainly wouldn’t be shocked by my play. And so I asked her, would you send it to him and at least get his opinion?” Somewhat less than graciously, the agent agreed.

The next day, it was a toss-up whether Crowley or the agent was more stunned when she phoned him to say, “Richard Barr and Edward Albee would like to have a drink with you. Can you go to Mr. Barr’s apartment tonight at 5:00?”

Crowley went and, although the meeting was cordial, “They didn’t say, ‘Yes, we want to do it.’ They thought they might consider doing it in the workshop—but everything went little by little by little. And Boys would have ended in the workshop. I mean, it was for free, just come in, first come first served. No seat reservations, no tickets, no nothing. The first night, nobody was there. But the second night, there was a line around the block! And it started pissing with rain, and the whole rest of the week it rained. And I said to Bob Moore, the director, ‘My God, the front of the theatre looks like the third act of Our Town!’ All those umbrellas. The New York intelligentsia began to descend on the play, and suddenly it was famous.”

Although the rain eventually did stop, the long lines continued for most of the next four seasons. Near the end of the first year, the original cast took the play to London, rturning to New York just in time to begin work on William Friedkin’s film version, the 1970 movie that exposed literally millions of people to Boys in the Band. Arguably, it was also through Friedkin’s direction that the most sensational, piteous aspects of Boys became its leitmotif.



Boys in the Band is set in the Manhattan apartment of Michael, the play’s protagonist and, because Boys is essentially a tragedy, its villain. The occasion is a birthday party that Michael is hosting for friend Harold. During the first act, the guests arrive—including, quite unexpectedly, Alan, a former college roommate of Michael’s. Alan is heterosexual and “square city,” and Michael has never come out to him, which makes Alan’s sudden arrival in the midst of the “freak show I’ve got booked for dinner” enough to push Michael to the brink.

Michael’s agitation is not helped when Alan punches Emory in the jaw or when the guest of honor arrives over an hour late. By the second act, the contained farce of the ruined party has darkened, and what follows is emotional grand guignol. Drunken and hostile, Michael savages his friends, forcing them to play a brutal telephone version of truth or dare in which they are brow-beaten into calling the one person they have ever truly loved and confessing their love to him. For Michael, the the exercise is meant largely as humiliation.

It was this ritualistic ego slaughter that Boys exposed to public scrutiny, along with a host of other “secrets” of homosexual life—Emory’s relentless effeminacy, for example, Michael’s obsession with Hollywood grandes dames, and Donald’s conviction that his fucked-up family turned him into a “queer.”

But there was more. During the course of the play, several characters fondly describe their trips to the baths; there are jokes about rimming. Larry and Hank, the play’s only intact couple, wage open war over the unlikelihood of male fidelity, even as other characters dredge up their pathetic and unrequited attachments to heterosexual men. Through it all, the melody of Michael’s malice and self-loathing is reaching crescendo, and he finally utters the play’s most malevolent line: “Show me a happy homosexual,” he bites out, “and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

For gays, the shock of Boys in the Band wasn’t that Crowley dared to touch on these issues—they had been raised before and, in the explosion of gay-made theatre the followed B, they would be dealt with time and again. Rather, the discomfort of gay and lesbian audiences came because the play—particularly the movie—aired the dirty laundry of homosexual life in the most public forum imaginable. Once loose, the images could no longer be controlled, nor could reaction to them. Even today, that process terrifies many lesbians and gay men.

Over the course of the last 20 years, of course, Mart Crowley has heard every conceivable objection to the kind of homosexuality he allowed the public to see in Boys in the Band.

For whatever reasons,” Crowley says by way of response, “I just called ‘em as I saw ‘em! I wrote that play from my gut. I was writing for me—the truth as I saw it of the gay scene at that time. I did [Boys in the Band] at a point in my life when I felt I connected with my own times in a dynamic way. And I felt very sure of my material. Of course, I was living with a lot of gay people when I put this play on, and nobody said, “Oh, this rings so false. We can’t do this, this is a lie!” I never heard the word “stereotype” until years later.

If people think it’s a negative aspect of gay life, well that’s just the way I felt about it. I was a person who was forming. I’ve changed over the years like anybody else would. I’m not that person anymore. But all my own upbringing, the prejudices that I was exposed to, and certainly the Catholic guilt that was drummed into me all of my life all of it reached its apex at this exploding moment in the summer of 1967. And in a way, I was never the same after it, either. For one thing, I didn’t think about God anymore! And absolutely everybody knew about me, from that point on!

Once, Boys in the Band was a shock, and people were aghast at the very subject matter. Then, when that died down, and the sociologists got going, there was a kind of rejection. Now it’s come full circle: This is our past and it’s not to be denied. I think that’s some sort of maturity because I do think we can find pieces of ourselves there, maybe even pieces of ourselves that we don’t like. And through that maybe we can do something to change, saying I don’t want to be that way, I don’t want to do that to myself anymore.

But it’s just ridiculous to sweep under the carpet anything that we don’t want to believe is there in ourselves. If we’re going to have any kind of health, every aspect of our whole self ought to be admissible."

The San Francisco production, under the guidance of Theatre Rhinoceros’s Artistic Director, Ken Dixon, found answers to the “negativism” of Boys in the Band both in the text itself and in a renewed emphasis on the ensemble. What became apparent, as a result, was the chorus of reaction and rebuttal that Michael’s friends provide to his acts of malice.

As Dixon pointed out when Boys opened in San Francisco, “When Bernard is broken up about having called the boy he was in love with, Emory is there to see that he gets home, to make him coffee, and tell him everything is going to be all right. Harold, even after he tells Michael off, makes a point of coming back to tell Michael, ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’ And after everything, Michael asks Donald, ‘Will I see you on Saturday,’ and Donald says, ‘Yes, if you don’t have any other plans.’ So they haven’t destroyed each other [and it isn’t] like they’re never going to see each other again.”

The other essential point to be made is that Larry, when he calls Hank on Michael’s private extension and tells him that he loves him, wins the telephone game. Hank and Larry are the specific counterpoint to Michael’s belief that to love is to be humiliated, and to his assumption that no one at his party could love anyone who loved him back. Significantly, the only other winner of the game, Alan, totes up the same number of points as Larry. At the play’s end, he firmly closes the door on Michael and returns to his wife, even as the reconciling Larry and Hank go upstairs and close the bedroom door. In most discussions of Boys in the Band, that parallelism is ignored.

But questions of “image,” of stereotype and representation have continued to haunt Boys in the Band, as they have done gay and lesbian theatre generally throughout the two decades since Stonewall. All “minority” groups seem to reach a stage in the creation of their public identities—of which theatre is a vital tool—during which the forces of assimilation do battle with advocates of cultural separatism. For both sides of the argument, mainstream media depictions (which are sometimes the only public images of the group) always come to be evaluated in light of how well or poorly they convey whatever meaning the group in question considers politically expedient.

Such a burden is a nearly impossible one for art to bear, and “minority” theatres have, to a certain extent, all been plagued by internal censorship that is sometimes far more severe than anything from outside. Such criticisms became quite heated, for example, when George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum premiered in 1986—both because the content of the play was critical of white-created and black-created images of blacks and because the discourse was placed in front of white audiences in mainstream theatres.

It would be difficult to argue in any objective way that Boys’ Michael is a more appalling “representative” of his breed than Martha (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Hedda Gabler, or Eddie Carbone (A View From the Bridge) are of theirs. One can scarcely imagine the stage without the cataclysmic heterosexual jealousy of Othello, or the cannibalistic lust and amorality that cripple Chance Wayne and Miss Del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth. Yet, in all of these instances, the “negative” qualities of the characters are seen as organic and broad. Michael’s flaws can similarly be seen as simply theatrical—familiar (if painful) without being representational.

At the same time, whether it is loved or hated, Boys in the Band has provided a standard by which gay theatre has often measured itself—whether through imitation or renunciation. For better or worse, gay theatre and gay politics were irrevocably linked by Stonewall, and Boys in the Band served as a lightening rod for energies that soon after exploded into a lavender stage revolution. Boys in the Band, that is, assumed a social context for gay life that was large enough to encompass a dialogue about gay life, that could take gayness, so to speak, as the occasion for a larger examination of social function and dysfunction, of love’s wounds and friendship’s balm, and of the implications of personal choice.

That may be what makes Crowley proud of the New York Times review he received from Clive Barnes in 1968: “The point is that this is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual way of life totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis for human experience.”

Modern gay and lesbian theatre, meanwhile (by which I mean audiences and playwrights, as well the institution itself), finds itself striving to build a house large enough to contain the need for visibility; the requirements of the political discourse against homophobia; the concomitant protest against the constraints of gay-created images; the demands of art; and the dialectic of trendy excursions into and away from isolation, assimilation, self-criticism, and celebration of gay and lesbian lives. In all that, there is no chance of pleasing all of the people even some of the time.

Theatre Rhinoceros’s revival of Boys in the Band, and reactions to it, points toward the tasks that lie ahead of lesbian and gay playwrights. Indeed, just as Crowley suggests, lesbian and gay theatre cannot be held hostage by the demand for “positive” images, as if lesbian and gay identity could withstand anything but a challenge.

The best theatre, it has been said, holds a mirror up and invites audiences to take a close look; but if the main function of gay theatre is to reproduce the ways in which lesbians and gay men want to see themselves, then the face is the mirror is a stranger, and the stranger wears a mask.

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^[1] A notable recent example is Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s After the Ball, in which the authors prescribe an elaborate, if totalitarian, course of conduct for the control and sanitizing of public images of homosexuality.