The shocking drama and dark camp of Mart Crowley’s play “The Boys in the Band,” which first bowed off-Broadway in 1968, is hard to top.
Filmmaker William Friedkin first brought this two-act stage drama about a group of out-gay male friends to the big screen in 1970, giving audiences a peek behind the velvet curtain of homosexual social life.
“Terrifying” is a word often ascribed to this play, written before Stonewall and before AIDS, as it exposed the damage and self-loathing gay men felt their in their then-little corner of the world.
And, in the 1960s, the play had to speak to all the hidden issues of the time surrounding LGBTQ life.“The Boys in the Band,” thankfully, doesn’t have to do that anymore.
And it doesn’t have to feel terrifying.
It’s 1968, and while gay men are largely regarded as an aberration by polite society, the LGBTQ population
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