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The Boys in the Band, 30 years later
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The Boys in the Band, 30 years later
John Rickard teaches at Monash University in Australia.
WHEN the play was first staged in New York in 1968, The Boys in the Band was a watershed event, the first "commercial" play not only to deal with homosexuality but in which all but one of the characters were self-identified homosexuals--and the release of the film version two years later was even more explosive. Mart Crowley's work was so assertively gay and so deliberately outrageous, complete with enough four-letter words to attract the interest of urban vice squads, that it was bound to shock the largely non-gay audiences that flocked to see the play and, in far greater numbers, the movie. This was true both in the U.S. and in my home country of Australia.
By his own account of himself at the time, Mart Crowley sounds like one of his own characters. Brought up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, he sought relief from the heat and his asthma by spending "his early life in the air-cooled movie houses from the time he was old enough to reach the ticket counter." At the age of seventeen--this was in the early 1950's--he boarded a bus headed for southern California, where he eventually found work in the movies, including two years as Natalie Wood's secretary. With her encouragement he turned to screenwriting, but soon fell into a deep depression and fled to Rome to live with Wood and Robert Wagner. When he finally got around to writing The Boys in the Band, he was told by agents, "Maybe in five or ten years, but not now." One astute producer, however, took the risk and produced the play, and it was an overnight "smash success with everyone clamoring for a piece of the action." (Alas, it would prove to...