Colin's Updates

"You're a sad and pathetic man. You're a homosexual and you don't want to be, but there's nothing you can do to change it. Not all the prayers to your god, not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you've go left to live. You may 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'll always be homosexual as well. Always Michael. Always. Until the day you die.
The Boys in the Band ~~ Mart Crowley

During my senior year of university, we were discussing The Boys in the Band. When asked to give my initial opinion of this play I said. Mart Crowley saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Tuesday, and wrote The Boys in the Band on Wednesday. I received an A in Modern Theatre for that remark alone.

All these years later, I still stand by this quip. This does not imply that The Boys in the Band is a bad play, or a substandard work. Quite the contrary ~~ The Boys in the Band is quite good ~~ if not wholly original.

The Boys in the Band is sharply written by Crowley. The lived-in exchanges of dialogue between this friend group hits not dissimilarly from little needles pricking exposed patches of skin slowly, one at a time. Almost everyone in the apartment uses their years of closeness as a vector to toxically relieve the self-resentment they’ve amassed in their years of survival in a homophobic society that only makes the inadequacy of their personal and professional lives hurt more.

Friendship is one of few reliable remedies for life’s pains. The Boys in the Band sees that commiseration warping into something ugly, tastes of emotional power over one another proving too empowering to stop indulging in for characters who rarely feel like they have the upper hand. The night’s emotional brutality isn’t made equal among members, though. Forced to bear the most callous strain of it is Bernard, who is the friend group’s sole Black member ~~ everyone else is white ~~ and is confronted with some racist insults that instantaneously make you wonder how self-loathing are these men?

Playwright Mart Crowley with his best friend & financial backer, Natalie Wood, and the original cast of The Boys in the Band.

The Boys in the Band was the first mainstream American drama to focus exclusively on gay male characters. It is an intense, frequently searing portrait of a group of men nakedly showing the toll of living in a world typically inclined to greet you with hatred, and picking on their differences and insufficiencies. It’s still powerful to see a play about gay men where insecurities and frustrations are laid so bare, where there is no deference to a straight gaze concerned with whether a character is likable or not. It did however conclude that homosexuality is more so a miserable life sentence than something worth embracing ~~ thankfully, the world has changed. It embraces the old-fashioned notion that gay men are to be pitied ~~ someone who would give anything not to be who he is and is seen as more human because of that recognition of wrongness. Sadly, there are many gay men who feel this way today.

The frustrations The Boys in the Band might inspire have a silver lining. That this play has lost some of its immediate identification with many modern gay readers only speaks to how much times have changed ~~ that's a good thing. Today The Boys in the Band feels more like a vivid glimpse into the past than a document doomed to feel eternally of the present; now it can be seen as part of a tapestry of gay theatre showing different facets of gay life.

And if you're lucky, it may even cast a demon or two out of you ...