Plays about gay people
18.) Do you remember seeing any plays concerning homosexuality in this period (for example 'The Boys In the Band')? What did you think of them?....Did you see any of these plays - or did you know people who did? Do recall talking about these plays?
I was living in NYC with my lover when Boys in the Band (the play) came out. It generated a lot of comment with straights and gay people. The straight press was ga-ga about it – it was so, so true-to-life, etc. etc. A lot of guys my local bar had seen it and they were quoting the bitch queen camp lines from it.
I was, let's say, apprehensive about what it was I was going to see. How could one trust the judgement of straights about what was "true" in gay life; on the other hand, those campy lines were viscious.
When I came out in the late Fifties one of the worst parts of it – in addition to realizing that I would be the victim of anti-gay hatred all my life – was to realize that there was a pervasive depressingly negative and nasty attitude in gay male life itself. For me that attitude, more or less coequal to "camping" itself, sucked the air out of gay life. I was repelled by its insistently bottomless negativity, misogyny and self-hatred. For me it cast a blight over much of gay life at that time.
My lover/roommate and I went to see BITB early in '69. All those often-quoted lines were there, but I laughed at them – with the same kind of embarrassed enjoyment that one usually feels about black humor. But in the end I felt the play was a cheat. I felt that it was reflecting the gay life of the late Fifties and early Sixties, and not that of the late Sixties. I believe that I was probably wrong. Though in a city like NYC, big and liberal, there was an opposite tone and emphasis arising in gay life, I have serious doubts about how widespread it was elsewhere.
I was glad I'd seen the play, just to be able to say that I had, but I definitely felt dirtied by it. To me it depicted a gay lifestyle that was passing away, but also one that was only part of what gay life had ever been like. When I read that Mart Crowley had been deeply depressed while writing it, I could imagine why. Over the years since then I have heard men say that the play or the movie had a very negative impact on how they felt about being gay. Ultimately, I think Crowley failed to get beyond the vitriolic camp clearly enough, though he seemed to be attempting it, to leave a lasting impression of gay male decency and humanity – and the existence of good-natured, forgiving humor among gay men.
I experienced it as something like a homo Amos 'n' Andy. Some people in the bar loved it, especially those people whose conduct in the bar was the same as that of the play's characters. Other guys liked and disliked it to varying degrees with most, as I recall, feeling that it reflected badly on gay men to the straight world. Well, Crowley wasn't, I suppose, attempting to write propaganda, so I couldn't really fault him on that score myself.
It did serve as a strong reminder, however, that straights were most comfortable laughing at us, just as whites were truly most comfortable on the whole laughing at blacks. It takes their fear out of our "otherness," but I didn't feel it was my duty to appear impotent or clownish for their comfort.
I didn't buy into the idea that Albee had turned a gay couple into a straight one for Virginia Woolf. It certainly was not ridiculous to consider that possibility, but if you look at his earlier plays, this is not a man who had a history of pulling his punches about race or sexuality. Based on that, and a conversation I once had with him around this time, I thought that he was dealing with the issues of the plot in a straightforward way and not masking them.
Fortunately NYC was soon producing other gay theater utilizing camp or eschewing it, and a musical such as Chorus Line presented gay characters to the world as better rounded and more easy to empathize with.
Jack
Poll
