Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Go See “Making the Boys”

                                                                                 Original cast picture from The Boys in the Band

Last Friday night was I lucky enough to attend a special showing at the Quad Theatre on W. 13th Street in the Village, of Making the Boys, Crayton Robey’s documentary about the creation of The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley's famous play about a gay birthday party where almost everything hangs out. 

This was really Lost Gay New York, and a keyhole into a world I knew only too well. It’s a wonderful movie, very moving at times, a bit over-long (Robey tries to attach everything gay, cultural, New York, American, queerish, etc. to The Boys in the Band; sometimes it sticks and sometimes it just doesn’t.), but ultimately very rewarding whether you were a life-time fan of the play, or like me, someone for whom the play with its bitchiness and bitterness, held a lot of repulsion and embarrassment, because afterall, aren’t we embarrassed by the truth? And The Boys in the Band is the truth. It’s not the only truth by a long shot, but all of us—OK, I know who you are out there—have been to a party at some time in our lives that ends up with drinking too much, saying too much, and hurting others too much, and we’ve lived to tell the tale. Mart Crowley did live, and told us some things that have taken me a lifetime to understand.

Making the Boys does something that is really important, although it doesn’t always get the message right, at least by me. It sees the most important aspect of the play being that moment when Michael, the host of the party (and I hope I have this speaker right) makes what was, in 1968, a truly life-changing statement: “You are a homosexual, and nothing you do will change that. You were born a homosexual and you will die one.”

 

In 1968, when hundreds of American shrinks were sending their kids to private schools by charging thousands of American gays and lesbians up the ass to “change” them, by any means possible; when the Catholic church was out there saying we’d burn in hell unless we lived totally celibate lives (OK, the shitheads haven’t strayed much from that line); when God-knows how many state mental hospitals were filled with incarcerated men who were being tortured as a means of “straightening them” (and I personally knew at least six men who’d been through that)—for Mart Crowley to write this speech was was hugely important.

It was a signal to a whole generation that being gay was not an option, or something you picked up like a disease and then could just let go of, or even (my worst of these three) a “lifestyle” you could go back into your closet and change. That speech hit a lot of people square behind the eyes and right down into the heart.

But I feel that, at this point in my life, the most important statement in The Boys in the Band is the simple question asked at the end of the birthday party: “Why can’t we love each other?”

It is a startling question, filled with tears and shudders because it opens up even more than the idea that being gay is not something you can change. The real question is: If we are this way, WHY can't we love one another?

It has taken me about 40 years to answer that question.

Because we do have such a hard time, such an impossible time, feeling loved. Homophobia is still killing us. And anyone who can’t see that doesn’t have the imagination necessary to envision a world where same-sex intimacy will be taken as casually, as unimportantly, and considered as valuable, as opposite-sex intimacy. Where the most simple, regular, spontaneous shows of affection, caring, and emotion towards members of your own sex are looked upon and smiled at. I’m waiting for that to happen, but until it does, Crowley’s question is still incredibly operative and important.

So, did I really like the play The Boys in the Band? Like Edward Albee, who has one of the most riveting voices in Making the Boys, said, “I didn’t like it at all.” Albee loathed the play, because it also embarrassed him, and he wanted something that “showed us in a better light.” (He also regrets the fact that he didn’t stick his own money into it: the play payed off like wildfire, and is, still, I’m sure, paying off.)

Like the poet Steve Turtell told me, “When I was 18, I left home [Queens, NY] and joined the circus.” The circus in Steve’s case being gay life and gay culture in Greenwich Village. In my case, the circus was San Francisco, then New York, and I left home by hitchhiking from Savannah, Georgia, to San Francisco at the tender age of 17 because I had been told that San Francisco was “crawling with queers,” and I had to leave the constantly violent nightmare of my childhood and adolescence in the South.

So for me, the Gay World was fantastic: it was real, exciting, and beautiful—even with the lies, the hiding, the pain of keeping so much of yourself out of the picture—all of that was better than my growing up in the homophobic South. I was sneaking into gay bars at 17, and loving them. By 18, they were pure NeverNeverLand. Being young, good-looking, and smart, I was given a ticket to the ball, even though I knew that this ticket had a definite expiration date: probably when I turned 25, and was no longer, by any definition either Chicken or Twinkie. (Chicken was fun; but I never thought I fit the Twink model—Twinkie was always something someone else was.)

So, The Boys in the Band was not my fav piece of queer literature—that was more in the suit of A Single Man, Another Country, The City and the Pillar, City of Night, and delectable pulp like The Sand Structure. But Boys was a real, touchable moment: it was line-dancing at Fire Island, dressing up to go to gay bars (and I mean real dressing, as in you had your queer bar schmattas that you got from shops in the Village), all sorts of parties with all sorts of people who looked like they came right out of the old After Dark magazine (and many did), and a sense of immediate closeness with many, many other men, strung together by our own outcastness.

In Making the Boys, Crowley talks about that sense of outcastness a lot. He comes off as an amazingly wounded and sweet person; he was for years Natalie Wood’s assistant, worked for Elia Kazan, wrote TV scripts (including one for a comedy pilot starring Bette Davis as an interior decorator: what were her favorite colors, blood red and mourning black?); then finally he made it BIG with Boys. Like overnight success made-it. This in itself is a phenomenon of a time—that the play, running in previews at what is now the Vandam Theater (which sat 70 butts) after it’s first night sold out for the next month to the gills.

It exploded. With no million-dollar P.R. campaign. No Twitter. No FaceBook. (OK, it probably had a lot of BedBook: guys went to their address books and called every man they’d ever slept with, but, hey, we did that in those days.) It went from Off-Broadway to Broadway in a flash. It also went from Broadway to London, from London to productions in dozens of languages, and everywhere people went crazy over it. I’m jealous as hell. What writer wouldn’t want that?

I think the real mark of how good The Boys in the Band is as a play is that I’ve seen it twice in amateur productions, and it was terrific. Great plays hold together even with less-than-great casts. You could have done the play with finger puppets and even trained dogs and it would still be hysterical at one moment (“Your lips are so blue it looks like you’ve been rimming a snow man.” Come on!), and moving the next.

So, I think you should go down to the Quad Theater on West 13th Street and see Making the Boys. It’ll be there for the next week or so, but hurry. Call for information, just to make sure it’s there. (212) 255-8800

You can learn more about 3-time IPPY Award winner and gay activist Perry Brass at his website, www.perrybrass.com . You can order his new book The Manly Art of Seduction from Amazon in regular paper format or on Kindle . You can also learn more about his books at SmashWords , the complete Internet marketplace for all things EBooks and otherwise, and on his Author Page at Amazon. Books by Perry Brass are now also available on Diesel Books. The Manly Art of Seduction was recently named a gold-medal winner of an IPPY Award for 2010, from Independent Publisher. You can reach him at belhuepress@earthlink.net if you have questions or comments you want to personally direct to him.