“You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
These words drip like venom from the tongue of one of film’s most viciously self-hating characters, Michael from Mart Crowley’s 1968 play “The Boys in the Band.” The play depicts the preparation for and violent aftermath of a birthday party attended by eight homosexual men and Michael’s closet-case college roommate. Famous for being the first play-turned-film to depict a cast entirely consisting of gay men, “The Boys in the Band” has received much critical attention and acclaim. The play received a 2018 Broadway revival and in 2020 was re-adapted to film on Netflix. The play is fascinating both in how foreign it is from today — its depiction of gay male identity in pre-Stonewall, pre-AIDS, and pre-Heartstopper America — as well as in how its parallels persist. I continue to return to this media because I think it represents a large loss in queer self-knowledge. In an era where growing conservatism is further dividing America at large and within the queer community itself, I think it is important to look at this relic of gay male history so that we do not lose sight of where we have come from, especially as the wound that the film represents becomes less culturally legible.
“The Boys in the Band” largely depicts the events of Harold’s, one of Michael’s friends, birthday party. The characters in the play display various archetypes within the gay male community—Michael representing the self-hating Catholic, Emory the queen-like femme, and Larry the polyamorous lover of straight-seeming Hank. It’s astounding to see these characters represented on stage in a way that does not feel flanderized or overdone. Their performances are remarkably true to life. Even to this day, people return to the film for its representation of the homosocial relationships between gay men and for Mart Crowley’s dry and witty gay humor.
Perhaps the most anachronistic aspect of “The Boys in the Band,” when viewed at the current moment, is the intense self-hatred that mars its characters. Michael, the lead, is a gay Catholic man who realized his sexuality in college. His ostensibly straight college roommate Alan’s intrusion into Harold’s party marks the main conflict of the piece as Alan represents a physical and psychological threat to the attendees. Emory, the most effeminate and least self-effacing character, is repeatedly shamed and reproached for his loud and explicit gayness both insofar as it places the attendees in danger of being found out and gaybashed. That very fear is realized later in the piece, where Emory eventually crosses the line by insulting Alan’s relationship with his wife. As a result, Alan ends up physically assaulting Emory. The emotional and physical violence of this play is excruciating — the obvious physical abuse that Emory faces is compounded in the second act when Michael plays a game “The Affairs of the Heart,” where he forces the party attendees to call the one person they truly loved and confess their feelings. Michael’s game reveals the innermost losses of these men, the deep hurt that constitutes their identities, and humiliates them for the amusement he gets out of forcing Alan to bear witness to this form of gay male suffering.
What is fascinating about the piece is how it constructs both the audience and Alan himself as spectators to the suffering of gay men in a way that engenders both sympathy and profound pity. Though the audience does not necessarily have to be gay themselves, their forced identification with Alan as outsiders of this party of dubious sexuality constructs us as outsiders to this inner world. In a time when gay men were unrepresentable on screen as a result of the Motion Picture Production Code (the Hays Code), centering gay men in the film, even while emphasizing their suffering, was radical. Furthermore, “The Boys in the Band” was one of the first queer films to be widely accepted into American culture, which represents a unique and challenging phenomenon. Certainly, one may point out the parallels with the Kill-Your-Gays trope, a strategy adopted during the Motion Picture Production Code’s reign, where gay characters could be present only if they either committed suicide or got murdered, but that explanation is too easy. The point of the film is not to kill its characters, but to cast them as victims of a damning culture that creates and destroys the men whom we have come to love and identify with.
Much of the conversation regarding “The Boys in the Band” centers on the belief that the film does not portray gay men well; that since the film depicts gay men as femme, loud, or self-hating, it is a “bad” representation that we should leave behind. One of the worst pitfalls in modern media literacy is the notion that representation must be inerrant. By claiming that certain representations are positive or negative, an arbitrary barrier is used to deem certain ways of gay existence good or bad, largely by the metric of what mainstream heterosexual culture finds palatable. In “The Celluloid Closet,” Harvey Fierstein said regarding “the sissy” — widely agreed to be “bad gay representation” — “I liked the sissy. Is it used in negative ways? Yeah, but my view has always been visibility at any cost. I’d rather have the negative than nothing.” Certainly, the characters in “The Boys in the Band” represent gay men at their most vicious and cutting, but they also represent them at their most human and vulnerable. They are characters who have lived complex lives, whose experiences of the world have involved love and loss, as well as great joy and great pain. We don’t claim that Cher in “Clueless” is a bad representation of women because she enjoys clothing, can’t drive, and gets with her stepbrother; we understand that she holds her own faults and character, which is allowed to expand into itself rather than being held down by positively detailing an identity group.
It may seem odd that a column which typically concerns music should suddenly take a turn for film, and it may seem odd to look toward such a vicious and antiquarian view of queer identity to comment on the present. To the first comment, I can only say that this is, in the end, my column, and if you’d like to read more about music, you should get a Pitchfork subscription. The second critique, however, I find much more interesting. Beyond the simple fact that people have considered the text important enough to merit reconsideration and recognition, why should we look to a source so tinged with anachronistic pain and grief to comment on what it is like to be queer today? Certainly, it is a meaningful positive advancement that, in today’s society, being gay does not carry with it the same meaning of societal condemnation, assurances of violence, and vicious self-hatred, but by losing the history of abjection, many queer people are learning to accept a system that we must resist. Our stories don’t need to center around how happy we are now. Overemphasizing gay joy risks lending to a gay mania that erases all of the history that has gotten us to where we are, the losses that constitute our identity, and the importance of a continued fight for the rights of our peers. It may simply be because I resent that the conversation surrounding Heartstopper centered on how uniquely important queer joy was that I feel the need to venerate media of gay suffering, but I think that palatability to nice, shiny audiences is not what gay people should fight for. Rather, we should look to the media that represents us as we are and as we have been, and which keeps up the fight for how society must exist so that our comrades and we may still be.
