The federal post office still maintained a ban on what could be sent in the mail. Lives were often ruined as a result. The most famous case is that of Newton Arvin, the English professor who was Truman Capote’s first lover. The Massachusetts police entered his home near Smith College in September 1960 with a search warrant because he had received beefcake magazines in the mail. They seized more magazines, pornographic photos, and, worst of all, his diaries. They arrested not just Arvin but six other men, including two junior faculty members: named by a frightened Arvin, according to one source; named in Arvin’s diaries, according to another. They were charged with sodomy and distributing pornography.
Arvin signed himself into a nearby mental hospital while waiting for the trial. Capote was in Spain working on In Cold Blood when he heard the news. He wrote Arvin a letter of solace and advice. “It’s happened to many others—who, like Gielgud, took it in stride and did not let it be the end of the world.” Actor John Gielgud had been arrested for solicitation a few years earlier in London. Arvin was supported by the literary world—Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, and others—but he still lost his job at Smith, as did the two junior faculty. In the end, the seven men were convicted, fined, and given suspended sentences.
So an organization like Mattachine was working against enormous odds. It was a brave action when, on a weekend in May 1965, ten members led by a fired government worker, Frank Kameny, picketed the White House with placards declaring “Bill of Rights for Homosexuals!” and “15,000,000 Homosexuals Ask for Equality, Opportunity, Dignity.” Rodwell marched with them. He was so elated by the experience that he proposed they protest every year—on July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Which they did. For the next four years, a band of a dozen or so impeccably dressed protesters—the men in coats and ties, the women in skirts—appeared in Philadelphia for what they called the Annual Reminder.
As often happens in minority politics, being right was more important than being effective. There were constant arguments which led to schisms in homophile organizations that were small to begin with. The Mattachine Society itself had broken up into regional divisions. Rodwell thought a bookstore might be more inclusive and inviting, but he did not have a terribly inclusive personality himself. Shortly before he opened the store, he split off from Mattachine New York to form his own group, HYMN (Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods—it was a golden age of acronyms and the names didn’t always make sense).
The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop opened on Thanksgiving weekend with a sign outside declaring “Bookshop of the Homophile Movement” and a sign in the window saying, “Gay Is Good.” On the shelves inside was a grand total of twenty-five titles. There was little available in 1967, but Rodwell reduced it further by avoiding not only pornography but most pulp fiction. However, he did stock novels by Vidal, Isherwood, and Baldwin, City of Night by John Rechy, Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule, and the historical fiction of Mary Renault. (Ever since 1956 with Last of the Wine, the British lesbian novelist had been publishing intelligent, well-reviewed novels about same-sex love, getting away with it chiefly because her books were set in ancient Greece and the love was literally Platonic.) There were novels in translation, too, in particular work by André Gide and Jean Genet.
Rodwell also sold political pamphlets, some more homemade than others. There were only a few magazines. After its own struggle with internal politics, ONE published its last issue earlier that year. (The final letters column included one from a scornful reader who questioned the attention given to literature. “Book reviews? Who reads books these days?”) But that fall a new monthly newspaper appeared, the Los Angeles Advocate, soon to be known as simply the Advocate. There was also the lesbian journal, the Ladder, and a new male magazine, DRUM, but it included photos of beefcake as well as articles about politics, so Rodwell refused to carry it.
Over the next fifteen years, stores like Oscar Wilde would appear in every major American city. Their owners were less squeamish than Rodwell about using porn to pay the rent, but their real emphasis was on literature and politics. The gay and lesbian bookstore movement would play an enormous role in the social change ahead.
Early gay politics was too small and pure to accomplish much on its own. Novels were impure and more effective, but they were read in private and rarely discussed. Theater, on the other hand, was as impure as fiction and highly public. People didn’t even need to see a play in order to talk about it.
Two months before Craig Rodwell opened his bookstore, thirty-three-year-old Mart Crowley arrived in New York with the manuscript of an unfinished play in his suitcase. Crowley had lived in New York before—he was originally from Mississippi—but he had been in Los Angeles trying to break into TV and movie writing.
There’s a surprising number of Southerners in this history, and it’s hard to say why. Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1934. He left home to study drama at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., intending to be a set designer. He first came to New York in 1957 and worked as a production assistant on several low-budget films before being hired by Elia Kazan. He became close friends with Natalie Wood during the shooting of Splendor in the Grass, directed by Kazan and written by William Inge. For the film’s final scene, Kazan asked Crowley to put on a dress and drive the pick-up truck that the actress playing Wood’s best friend couldn’t steer—the babyfaced Crowley was very pretty and looked ten years younger than he was. When Wood and her husband, Robert Wagner, moved out to Hollywood, Crowley moved with them.
All this time he was writing, not stage plays or screenplays, but TV plays. It was the age of Playhouse 90 and other television showcases, but, unlike Gore Vidal, Crowley was unable to sell his work. Out in Los Angeles, he took various day jobs until he saved enough to move to Italy to write a screenplay based on Dorothy Baker’s 1962 novel, Cassandra at the Wedding, with two roles for Natalie Wood as twin sisters: one straight, the other lesbian. (Baker was the clever, risk-taking author of Trio, the last play shut down by the police under the Wales Padlock Law in 1945. She also wrote Young Man with a Horn, a novel about jazz with a strong lesbian subplot. Baker was married, but her literature professor husband seems to have encouraged her in writing about bisexuality.) The script was highly praised and bought by 20th Century Fox, but the lesbian character—as discreetly done in the screenplay as it is in the novel—scared the studio and the movie never got made. More writing work followed, however, including a 1965 TV pilot for Bette Davis, The Decorator. Crowley gave her a male sidekick, to be played by Paul Lynde. He would’ve been the first gay man on TV, but the producers insisted a woman play the role and cast butch character actress Mary Wickes. The pilot was shot but the series was never picked up. Crowley became very depressed. His friend Wood gave him a year of therapy as a gift. (Although his love affairs were intense but brief—the longest lasting only six months—Crowley had a genius for long-term friendships with both straight and gay people.)
Every Sunday, Crowley liked to buy the New York Times, go to the Swiss Cafe and drink bullshots (beef bouillon and vodka), and read about life back East. One Sunday in January 1966, he opened the Times and saw Stanley Kauffmann’s article, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.” Where other gay men felt insulted by the criticisms and carping tone, Crowley was struck by one particular sentence: “The homosexual dramatist must be free to write truthfully of what he knows, rather than try to transform it to a life he does not know, to the detriment of his truth and ours.” Crowley liked the idea of writing the truth about gay life.
He did not have the opportunity to act on it, however, until the following year, in the summer of 1967. He was housesitting for six weeks in the Beverly Hills mansion of a female friend while he decided whether or not he should move back to New York. The staff fed and looked after him, and his duties were minimal. With time on his hands, he began to write dialogue; he soon found himself writing a play about a circle of gay friends. Initially it was set in a gay bar, but he real
ized a bar was too crowded with superfluous people, so he moved the play to the apartment of a figure based loosely on himself, Michael. He was far harsher with this character than he was with the others. He drew upon friends for the rest of the ensemble. Bookish Douglas Murray became the bookish, loyal Donald; the former dancer Howard Jeffrey became the darkly brilliant former skater Harold. He included pieces of himself in all the characters, not just Michael. (He gave the story of falling in love with his dentist in high school to the character of Emory.) He was surprised at how quickly the writing went. He hit a block only in the second act and needed something new, so he invented a mean party game, “Affairs of the Heart,” where each man must telephone the great love of his life. The game was inspired in part by the party games promised in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: “Hump the Hostess” and “Get the Guests.”
By the end of the summer, when Crowley left the mansion, the play was finished except for the last scene. He took the manuscript with him when he flew to New York; he finished it that fall in a borrowed house on Fire Island, writing Michael’s final breakdown there. He showed it to his friend, the actor/director Robert Moore, who loved it and wanted to direct it. He showed it to an agent who hated it and wanted to throw him out of her office. But he persuaded her to send it to Richard Barr, the producer of Virginia Woolf. If anyone would dare touch this play, he thought Barr would. The agent gave in. She sheepishly called Crowley the next day to say that Barr had read the play as soon as he got it, loved it, and wanted to meet with Crowley that afternoon.
Barr and Edward Albee had taken a portion of the huge profits from Virginia Woolf and formed their own company to produce new work by new playwrights. Crowley met Barr and Albee for drinks at Barr’s Greenwich Village apartment. Barr did most of the talking while Albee sat by with his usual Sister Grimm expression, looking “sphinx-like and inscrutable,” saying little except to ask what Crowley thought of “Brechtian objectivism.” Barr wanted to do a workshop production of the play as soon as possible.
In the years ahead, critics would claim that Boys in the Band was mostly a variation or even a copy of Virginia Woolf, yet it’s hard to see that when one reads the two plays back to back. Both use profanity fearlessly, but they use it differently. The only thing they really share is the idea of a mean party game. I suspect the idea of kinship was planted in critics’ minds by the fact that both playwrights were gay and both plays were produced by Richard Barr. For me, Boys does not echo Virginia Woolf as much as it echoes The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill: an ensemble of characters is confronted by a friend who wants to strip them of their illusions. Michael turns into a truthteller like Hickey of Iceman halfway through the play, but his “truths” ultimately turn against him. Albee would later attack Boys, claiming he had always hated it. But as Crowley now points out, if he really hated it, why did he let Barr produce it? I suspect that the later endless comparisons to Virginia Woolf, for good and ill, turned Albee against the play.
Things happened quickly after the first meeting. Barr and co-producer Charles Woodward hired Crowley’s friend Robert Moore to direct. The play was quickly cast despite the fears of actors and (more often) their agents about playing gay characters. It was workshopped downtown at the Vandam Street Theater in January 1968, playing to packed houses for five nights. The audiences were almost entirely male. Word was already out. Boys in the Band opened off Broadway on April 14, 1968, at Theatre Four in midtown—ten days after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
People said many unkind things about Boys in the years ahead, and some of them are true, but they don’t undo the power of the play. Pauline Kael complained that its homosexuals were “a forties-movie bomber-crew cast: a Catholic, a Jew, a Negro, one butch type, one nellie”—but what’s wrong with that? Should they be similar? The cast has the diversity of a small Southern town transferred to a birthday party. The nine men talk about being gay, of course, but they also talk about psychiatry, jobs, money, drugs, religion. The play remains genuinely funny. Not only did Crowley create a score of memorable one-liners—“Connie Casserole,” “Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?” “You look like you been rimming a snow man,” and “Life is a goddamn laff-riot”—he put them together in such a way that they bounce and ricochet off each other. Even when the play turns serious in the second act, a funny line can still jump up and bite you on the nose. (A line about a sweater, “The one on the floor is vicuna,” makes me laugh solely because of the context.) And the play has three great characters: Michael, Harold, and Emory.
Emory is the nelly queen, but nelly made electric, transcendent. He begins in stereotype yet there is nothing stock or stale about him. He is wonderfully witty, but also sweet and secretly tough. A steely defiance comes through in both the gaudy performance by Cliff Gorman recorded in the movie, and the more delicate performance by James Lecesne in the 1996 revival. Emory’s friendship with Bernard, the sole black man, is poignant and disturbing, two minorities within a minority bonding through shared insults. It’s a dangerous kind of bond, which the two men both acknowledge.
Harold is the birthday guest, the self-described “thirty-two-year-old, ugly, pockmarked Jew fairy.” He arrives stoned at the end of Act One and stays stoned. He doesn’t protect his friends when Michael attacks them—he knows he can’t fight Michael directly. He can only observe and make wisecracks. Yet he is the real truth teller of the play, not Michael, when he coolly confronts their host at the end:
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.
The actor Leonard Frey made Harold unforgettable in the play and movie, an unearthly character with frizzy hair, a dazed look, and a strangled purr. He floats above the proceedings like a stoned angel, offering bitter jokes and harsh truths. He is, as Tony Kushner wrote, “Crowley’s most original creation, and he seems to come from another world—perhaps the future.”
Michael, the party’s host, is the most important character in the play, and the most challenging. As playwright Charles Busch later said, Boys isn’t about a pack of self-hating gay men, it’s about one self-hating gay man, but he runs the show. Michael requires a very strong actor to make his shift of emotion in Act Two believable, when he suddenly turns against his guests. Yet the unhappiness driving his attack is there from the start: Michael’s brittle jokes, the time spent in therapy, the pain he’s tried to anesthetize with alcohol, shopping, the Catholic Church, and old movies. (But not love. We hear nothing about Michael’s love life.) The unexpected arrival of his straight roommate from college, Alan, plunges Michael back into his closet self and releases all his demons.
At the end, after his breakdown, Michael is talking only about himself when he talks to Donald before going to midnight mass:
Michael: If we… if we could just… not hate ourselves so much. That’s it, you know. If we could just learn not to hate ourselves quite so much.
This is a play about a gay man arguing with his own self-hatred, and self-hatred loses in the end. Whatever pieces of Michael remained in Crowley when he began the play, they were burned away by the time he finished.
An equally important truth emerges earlier, when Harold leaves the party with his gifts, including the hustler that Emory bought him.
Harold: Oh Michael… thanks for the laughs. Call you tomorrow.
It sounds like a threat but it’s also a promise. Their friendship will survive this battle. In fact, battle is part of their friendship.
Boys in the Band engages in the same kind of truth telling that straight plays of this era did, yet most reviewers forgot that and spoke as if only homosexuals
were unhappy. The play also includes a long-term gay couple, Hank and Larry, who have a fight but make up. They are upstairs making love during the angry speeches at the end, in secret counterpoint. But almost nobody wanted to talk about the happy gay couple.
Gay politicals like Craig Rodwell and Frank Kameny did not like Boys, but political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action. Boys was attacked not because it was behind the times, as some claimed, but because it reflected real life all too accurately.
Gay men flocked to the play and responded in every way imaginable. Diarist Donald Vining saw it with his partner and they loved it. “In the first act we screamed with laughter as the gay party got under way but the second act, as they got drunker and nastier, was much more sober.” One friend of mine, now in his seventies, remembers the original production as “a hoot.” Yes, Act Two was unhappy, but he believed that was just for the sake of drama. Another gay man, however, who has just turned sixty, was taken to the play by a straight friend who wanted to save him from his homosexuality—and briefly succeeded. This gay man got married and did not come out for another five years. Younger gay men who lived outside major cities responded more positively, not least because the play showed a party of friends. Novelist Joe Keenan, who first knew the play as a movie, could not understand why people criticized it. “A bunch of gay friends hang out and enjoy each other’s jokes? It was my idea of heaven.”
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 17