The Gay Metropolis (36 page)

When Crowley first showed the script to his agent, she was so embarrassed that she couldn't even look him in the eye. She whispered, “I can't send this out with my name on it. Why, it's like a weekend on Fire Island!” But the agent hadn't absorbed the changes already wrought by an amazing decade, while Crowley had perfect timing and perfect pitch. Twenty-four hours after leaving his agent's office he was in Richard Barr's apartment; Barr and Charles Woodward, Jr., agreed to produce his new play on the spot.
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Then Crowley sat down with the director Bob Moore, whom he had known at Catholic University in Washington, and together they cut the script in half. “It worked as a play when Bob and Mart together trimmed it down to a workable size,” said Murray Gitlin, the former Broadway chorus boy who stage-managed the first workshop production of
Boys
on Vandam Street.

The word of mouth was extraordinary—even before the first public performance in 1968. At least eight of the nine characters were gay men, while the uninvited guest at the birthday party insisted that he really was in love with his wife, despite the steady taunts of his host. Crowley told colleagues that the married character was based on his friend Dominick Dunne. The gay characters ranged from the passing-for-straight formerly married Hank, who hadn't come out until he was thirty-two, to the flamingly
gay Emory, who called everyone Mary. Gitlin had recruited Cliff Gorman for the role of Emory, and Gitlin said it was a “transforming” moment when Gorman first read for the part. After the opening, Gorman gave frequent interviews to make sure that everyone knew that he really was a happily married, beer-swigging heterosexual (“You Don't Have To Be One To Play One,” a
Times
headline explained).

On opening night, Crowley was jittery. “You think they'll laugh?” the playwright asked Bob Moore.

“Mart, they've been laughing at fags since Aristophanes. They're not going to stop tonight.”

Moore was right. Along with the musical
Hair,
which was shocking Broadway audiences that year with its own explicit language (“sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty”) and a cast who stripped down to their birthday suits,
Boys
became the sensation of the 1968 season. Crowley immersed himself in every detail of the production, spending $20 from his own pocket for just the right “green Rhine wine glass” for one of the boys to drink from and shopping with the actors to find the perfect clothes—a trip that got featured in
Women's Wear Daily
(“The Clothes The Boys Wear On Stage Are Woven Into The Fabric Of The Play”). Seven months into the production, the play had already earned its backers a $70,000 profit, and $5.95 seats were being scalped for $25. A Presbyterian minister even brought the cast across the river to address his Brooklyn congregation. “As Christians,” he explained, “we must look at one another with love and compassion.”

Although widely seen as self-loathing by subsequent generations of gay men, the play was revolutionary because of its honesty and its openness. “The thing I always hated about homosexual plays was that the homosexuality was always the big surprise in the third act,” Crowley said shortly after
Boys
opened. “Well, life is not like that. Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the play.” Gitlin was impressed because “these were people who were queer who could think, who could talk, who could read. I thought, It's outrageous, and terribly courageous. It was about many aspects of my life—not exactly, but the situation.” The actors were also good-looking, which was another advance, especially for teenaged theatergoers, most of whom had never seen an attractive person identified as a homosexual. In the
Times,
the theater critic Clive Barnes called it “by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen.” He also thought it made
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
look like “a vicarage tea party.” Barnes felt that the relentlessly camp humor of
Boys
was a little much, but he acknowledged how thoroughly it had been absorbed into
the culture: “the New York wit, famous the world over, is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry martini glass.” And Barnes called the play an explicit answer to Kauffmann's plea for “a more honest homosexual drama. … It is quite an achievement.”

Stephen Sondheim saw the play during its first week of performances and considered it “the shot heard round the world.” Sondheim said, “I thought the play would be genuinely important, if it got made into a movie. I thought, boy, if this could only become popular, it will do so much to educate people who have no idea about homosexuality, gay life, gay subculture. And in fact it did.” Howard Rosenman went with Leonard Bernstein early in the run. “I thought it was the most incredible play I had ever seen,” said Rosenman. “And I'll never forget it: at the end of the play, Leonard jumped up and screamed ‘Bravo!'
He
thought it was the most incredible thing he'd ever seen.” Neil Simon said he had never witnessed such honesty on the stage before. He told the writer Richard Kramer that
Boys
“did for plays what
Oklahoma!
did for musicals.”

The play achieved for the theater what the decade accomplished for the country: it made people think differently by puncturing hypocrisy. It also demonstrated the value of all kinds of people who did not fit into the neat little boxes of the fifties, and made a plea for their acceptance, neuroses and all. Writing in the “Arts and Leisure” section of the
Times
a couple of months after it opened, Rex Reed called
Boys
a breakthrough because the characters are human beings who “have fun. … They don't kill themselves or want to get married or spend the rest of their lives tortured by conscience. The only way they ‘pay' is to know who they are.”

As Michael gets drunker and drunker during the second half of the play, the party gets progressively nastier, with the host aiming nearly as many darts at himself as he does at everyone else. Gradually, it builds into a volcanic portrait of stylish self-hatred. Michael describes the boredom he felt from compulsive coupling, in words that shocked Off-Broadway audiences in 1968: “Bored with Scandinavia, try Greece. Fed up with dark meat, try light. Hate tequila, what about Slivovitz? Tired of boys, what about girls—or how about boys and girls mixed, and in what combination? And if you're sick of people, what about poppers? Or pot or pills or the hard stuff?”
^*

“Michael doesn't have charm,” Harold explains. “Michael has countercharm.”

“I knew a lot of people like those people, and I would say that probably all nine of them are split-up pieces of myself,” said Crowley. “It was definitely a reflection of what was wrong in my head; but that's the way that I saw things then.”

Harold appears to be at his most vicious when he fires this parting shot at his host: “You are a sad and pathetic man. You're a homosexual and you don't want to be. But there is nothing you can do to change it—not all your prayers to your God, not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you've got left to live. You may very well one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough—if you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate—but you will always be homosexual as well. Always, Michael. Always. Until the day you die.”

On the surface, this speech is an assault on Michael's malignant self-hatred. But hidden in the subtext is a surprisingly liberating message. Harold is proclaiming the immutability of homosexuality—and the appalling complicity of psychiatry and religion in gay self-hatred. Thousands of psychiatrists had committed unprosecutable malpractice by nurturing the myth that homosexuality could be—and
shouldbe
—“cured,” instead of encouraging gay people to value themselves for who they were. And although there were no sixties militants among Crowley's characters onstage, there were plenty of them every night sitting in the audience—and these were the offenses they were about to avenge.

In the final scene, Michael pleads, “If we could just learn not to hate ourselves so much.” To which his friend Donald replies, “Inconceivable as it may be, you used to be worse than you are now. Maybe with a lot more work you can help yourself some more—if you try.” These lines suggested how far gay men had come by 1968—and just how far they still
had to travel. The play provided a precise diagram of the place that they needed to get beyond. Part of its importance would be as a benchmark: a permanent reminder of how not to behave toward friends.

The play was a hit all around the world, with productions in London, Los Angeles, Paris, Melbourne, Tokyo,
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Tel Aviv, Las Vegas, Amsterdam—even Philadelphia. Crowley pulled off the rare feat of keeping both the script and the original cast intact for the movie. But gay life would change dramatically between 1968 and 1970, and many of his words seemed dated almost as soon as they were spoken.
^†
Just a year after it opened, six different Off-Broadway shows featured gay themes, including
Fortune and Men's Eyes,
a prison drama starring the newcomer Don Johnson in what
Time
described as a “grimly visible” onstage rape scene.

When the film of
Boys
opened in 1970, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate took a nineteen-year-old girl whom he had just met as his date. She was “very pretty, obviously bright, obviously a little shy.” He considered the choice of the movie “a bit of a gamble with someone I didn't know at all, but what the hell.” He discovered it was “a challenge to the established order from the word go. I enjoyed the intensity of it. What was interesting was that my date obviously did too. She immediately began laughing at all the jokes, including, or even especially, the raunchiest ones. I was very much intrigued. It turned out to be an example of how liberation works across the spectrum. I suppose it was liberating for everyone to see those guys articulating those forbidden impulses so frankly.” Their first date was “quite chaste,” but three years later they were married—and they've been married ever since.

In 1970, the film was still startling in the heartland, but in Manhattan it lacked the shock value (and the live power) of the original. Jack Nichols and his lover Lige Clarke dismissed it in a joint review as “Bores in the Band.” Frank Kameny hated the play
and
the movie. He said his slogan “Gay is good” was intended as a “direct antidote to the mind-set among gays epitomized by that abomination,
Boys in the Band.”
However, the play continued to have a trickle-down effect: in 1972 a group of suburban
fathers starred in a community production in Westchester. The
Times
reported that all of the amateur thespians—including two IBM men and an insurance salesman—“have learned to hug and kiss each other ‘without wanting to die inside,' as one of them expressed it.” Tony Comitto, an IBM budgets manager, put it this way: “It boils down to recognition and escape. … In order for a guy to get up onstage and do it, he has to be secure in his own masculinity. If every person in the room thinks I'm queer for the two and a half hours I'm onstage, that's great. But I'm not sure I want them to go out of the theater thinking that.”

Twenty-five years after the play first opened, Richard Kramer prepared himself for an anniversary interview with Crowley by screening the movie version of
Boys
for gay men in their forties, thirties, and twenties. Those in their forties told Kramer, “We're not like that anymore.” The thirty-year-olds said, “We're more like that than we'd like to admit.” And the twenty-year-olds said, “We're just like that.”

Kramer's survey suggests that despite all the changes of the last thirty years, most gay people still start out with tremendous self-hatred. Most of them go through a twenty-year process of self-acceptance. The big change after the last three decades is that genuine progress is no longer so unusual.

Harold's birthday present in the play is a laconic $20-a-night hustler whom Harold immediately nicknames Tex. Murray Gitlin had asked Robert La Tourneaux to audition for the part after he met him at the Westside YMCA. “He was one of the most beautiful young men,” Gitlin recalled. La Tourneaux hesitated at first because he thought it was demeaning to play a hustler. But after the play became a hit, he repeated the role in London and Los Angeles, and again for the film.

La Tourneaux complained during the seventies that he never got any more good roles because he “was typecast as a gay hustler, and it was an image I couldn't shake.” By 1978, he was working in a male porno theater in Manhattan, doing a one-man cabaret act.

Then life imitated art altogether: La Tourneaux
became
a hustler.

“He tried to extort money from someone who was supposedly a friend—probably a John,” said Githn. La Tourneaux was arrested and sent to the New York City prison on Rikers Island. There he tried to kill himself. Finally he was hospitalized at Bellevue where Gitlin went to visit him: “He was in a private room with leg shackles. And the guard guarding twenty-four hours a day, wearing a gown and mask. It was just awful. And Bob just kept getting sicker and sicker. It was just such a waste: he was so sweet and so beautiful and had so much going for him. I saw him a couple of
weeks before he died. He was in Metropolitan Hospital, he was out of prison. And the nurse who was assigned to him had seen
The Boys in the Band
on television the night before. And he died in her arms. And to her, he was a star.”

THE BOYS IN THE BAND
marked the beginning of the end of an era personified by gay men who adored Judy Garland (and carried a poodle as their “insignia,” as one character puts it in the play). Garland was an icon of a camp culture in which a group of people had a special devotion to otherwise enormously popular stars. Like so many other camp figures, Garland was an extremist, constantly alternating between exuberance and depression. At times her behavior looked like a parody of the dark side of gay life—the corrosive repetition of sex, drugs, and pathos which Michael had described in
Boys.
(“What's more boring than a queen doing a Judy Garland imitation?” Michael asked at the beginning of the play. “A queen doing a Bette Davis imitation,” Donald replied.) When she was thirty-eight, Garland called her life “a combination of absolute chaos and absolute solitude.”