The Making and Breaking of The Boys in the Band

Celebrated playwright and television writer, Mart Crowley survives to tell his artistic struggle leading up to the making of his best known work, The Boys in the Band, produced for the stage by Richard Barr (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and directed by Robert Moore. The opening nights of the groundbreaking 1967 play at the Playwrights Unit was attended by Jackie Kennedy, Barbara Walters, and Marlena Dietrich and other major public figures drawn by the brave new Off-Broadway production about how a group of gay men react to an uninvited guest at a birthday party. It is credited with being the first play to show gay men "as they are," which ironically become dated a few years after the Stonewall riots. Director Crayton Robey's behind the scenes story, Making the Boys, (now on DVD from First Run Features) is a continuation of the 1970 film and stage-play featuring exclusive interviews with the talent who brought the play and film to the screen.

Every gay man was under the radar in the 60s; one had to be. The artistic question posed in MTB is whether gay playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and Edward Albee were writing in "hidden" gay messages represented in their straight characters or were their plays strictly straight affairs. This crisis of queer sensibility sooner or later had to be bust wide open. After a long bought of depression and unemployment, Hollywood hag Mart Crowley was inspired by New York Times critic Stanley Kaufman's article "Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises" a blatant accusation of gay playwrights - that they were camping up American theater and should, rather, portray their own lives on stage. Then came Mart Crowley and The Boys in the Band.

Making the Boys starts from the inception of the script few producers would touch to a play socialites eagerly attended, and a film many gays abjectly protested. Once more well respected actors in New York theatre began to attach to the project, they lent the script and its content creditability. The script raised fear among homosexuals in the business who were creating the very popular culture they were not allowed to be openly gay in. Robey traces gay history from the bar raids of the swinging 60s to the reckless sexual liberation and political solidarity in the 70s, then through the blindsiding endemic that weakened the public identity of gays in the 80s. Like the documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, we are reminded why no one saw it coming, but as Larry Kramer says in film, we still have never fully taken responsibility for the disease we spread to one another.

All of the original cast of the play were asked to transition from play acting to film acting in the adaptation of The Boys in the Band shot at the Chelsea Studios, NYC. Mart Crowley decided to co-produce and turn down offers from Hollywood to adapt the play into a major motion picture with Cinema Center Films, a division of CBS television network. Director William Friedken (The Exorcist) would make another controversial film about the gay experience in Cruising (1980) through the eyes of an undercover police officer played by Al Pacino. Pacino had previously played the lover of a pre-op trans-woman who robs a bank to pay for her operation in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) by Sidney Lumet.

Making the Boys features an exclusive interview with playwright Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Malcolm), who was skeptical of the play's potential success and said it would send the wrong message to the heterosexual population. As he looks back, he says "Boy, was I wrong." Albee comes across as a kind of armchair gay activist, yet Albee remains totally vigilant despite the strides made in gay civil rights. He is not one to admit that he and other gay writers could be identified as such through their plays. It was a bold move by Mart Crowley to write a play that would shoulder that burden.

Robey interviews Robert Wagner (former husband of Natalie Wood), William Friedkin, Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Norm Korpi (The Real World), Carson Kressley (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), Christian Siriano (Project Runway), Curtis Kelly (Owner, Stonewall Inn), Paul Rudnick (In and Out), Michael Musto of the Village Voice, author Stephen Tropiano (Music on Film: Grease), Historian David Carter, and Andrew Tobias (The Best LIttle Boy in the World). Dan Savage (It Gets Better, The Kid), one of the more profound contemporary commentators on the subject of gay life says "To be a dumb gay person was won for you by gay people who came before when being gay was so complicated and so difficult that dumb gay people didn't last."

Many of The Boys in the Band cast members including Robert Letournoux (Cowboy Tex), Kenneth Nelson (Michael), Frederick Combs (Donald), Keith Prentice (Larry), Leonard Frey (Harold) died of AIDS complications or distanced themselves from their fellow actors and the producers. The remaining boys Laurence Luckinbill (Hank), Peter White (Alan McCarthy) tell their sides of the story in Making the Boys. Letournoux became a drug addict, prostituted himself, and stole for drugs; choices he blamed on the play, which he felt was a mistake. Producer Dominick Dunne claims that Bobby was the first to contract HIV and he was enraged that he wouldn't live to have a career after. While he had a number of successful stag roles following TBITB, Clif Gorman, supposedly made a career out of saying he was straight after the play and was deeply affected by the public's assumption that he himself was the lispy gay man he played so naturally in the film. In Making the Boys, when an interviewer on Emerald City public access TV show asks Letournoux why making a career after TBITB was so difficult for the cast, he says it was the same reason people wouldn't hire gay firemen in NYC. Others including Leonard Frey (Nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Fiddler on the Roof, 1971) did achieve critical acclaim for roles following TBITB. Though ultimately successful, Peter White (Armageddon, All My Children) faced intolerance when told by Disney that he would have to take TBITB off his resume. Reuben Greene is nowhere to be found and didn't say in touch with the other boys.

The cathartic play changed the face of higher culture and may have pushed gays out of the closet, but it remains product of its era. Though it hasn't transcended time for audiences younger than the film and revivals of the play failed to have the same impact in the United States that the original had in the sixties, we're still talking about The Boys in the Band because it reflects a moment at the crux of modern gay history.

- Sawyer Lahr