Although widely seen as self-loathing by subsequent generations of gay men, the play was revolutionary because of its honesty and its openness. “The thing I always hated about homosexual plays was that the homosexuality was always the big surprise in the third act,” Crowley said shortly after Boys opened. “Well, life is not like that. Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the play.” Gitlin was impressed because “these were people who were queer who could think, who could talk, who could read. I thought, It’s outrageous, and terribly courageous. It was about many aspects of my life—not exactly, but the situation.” The actors were also good-looking, which was another advance, especially for teenaged theatergoers, most of whom had never seen an attractive person identified as a homosexual. In the Times, the theater critic Clive Barnes called it “by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen.” He also thought it made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like “a vicarage tea party.” Barnes felt that the relentlessly camp humor of Boys was a little much, but he acknowledged how thoroughly it had been absorbed into the culture: “the New York wit, famous the world over, is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry martini glass.” And Barnes called the play an explicit answer to Kauffmann’s plea for “a more honest homosexual drama. … It is quite an achievement.”
Stephen Sondheim saw the play during its first week of performances and considered it “the shot heard round the world.” Sondheim said, “I thought the play would be genuinely important, if it got made into a movie. I thought, boy, if this could only become popular, it will do so much to educate people who have no idea about homosexuality, gay life, gay subculture. And in fact it did.” Howard Rosenman went with Leonard Bernstein early in the run. “I thought it was the most incredible play I had ever seen,” said Rosenman. “And I’ll never forget it: at the end of the play, Leonard jumped up and screamed ‘Bravo!’ He thought it was the most incredible thing he’d ever seen.” Neil Simon said he had never witnessed such honesty on the stage before. He told the writer Richard Kramer that Boys “did for plays what Oklahoma! did for musicals.”
The play achieved for the theater what the decade accomplished for the country: it made people think differently by puncturing hypocrisy. It also demonstrated the value of all kinds of people who did not fit into the neat little boxes of the fifties, and made a plea for their acceptance, neuroses and all. Writing in the “Arts and Leisure” section of the Times a couple of months after it opened, Rex Reed called Boys a breakthrough because the characters are human beings who “have fun. … They don’t kill themselves or want to get married or spend the rest of their lives tortured by conscience. The only way they ‘pay’ is to know who they are.”
As Michael gets drunker and drunker during the second half of the play, the party gets progressively nastier, with the host aiming nearly as many darts at himself as he does at everyone else. Gradually, it builds into a volcanic portrait of stylish self-hatred. Michael describes the boredom he felt from compulsive coupling, in words that shocked Off-Broadway audiences in 1968: “Bored with Scandinavia, try Greece. Fed up with dark meat, try light. Hate tequila, what about Slivovitz? Tired of boys, what about girls—or how about boys and girls mixed, and in what combination? And if you’re sick of people, what about poppers? Or pot or pills or the hard stuff?”*
“Michael doesn’t have charm,” Harold explains. “Michael has countercharm.”
“I knew a lot of people like those people, and I would say that probably all nine of them are split-up pieces of myself,” said Crowley. “It was definitely a reflection of what was wrong in my head; but that’s the way that I saw things then.”
Harold appears to be at his most vicious when he fires this parting shot at his host: “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.”
On the surface, this speech is an assault on Michael’s malignant self-hatred. But hidden in the subtext is a surprisingly liberating message. Harold is proclaiming the immutability of homosexuality—and the appalling complicity of psychiatry and religion in gay self-hatred. Thousands of psychiatrists had committed unprosecutable malpractice by nurturing the myth that homosexuality could be—and shouldbe—“cured,” instead of encouraging gay people to value themselves for who they were. And although there were no sixties militants among Crowley’s characters onstage, there were plenty of them every night sitting in the audience—and these were the offenses they were about to avenge.
In the final scene, Michael pleads, “If we could just learn not to hate ourselves so much.” To which his friend Donald replies, “Inconceivable as it may be, you used to be worse than you are now. Maybe with a lot more work you can help yourself some more—if you try.” These lines suggested how far gay men had come by 1968—and just how far they still had to travel. The play provided a precise diagram of the place that they needed to get beyond. Part of its importance would be as a benchmark: a permanent reminder of how not to behave toward friends.
The play was a hit all around the world, with productions in London, Los Angeles, Paris, Melbourne, Tokyo,* Tel Aviv, Las Vegas, Amsterdam—even Philadelphia. Crowley pulled off the rare feat of keeping both the script and the original cast intact for the movie. But gay life would change dramatically between 1968 and 1970, and many of his words seemed dated almost as soon as they were spoken.† Just a year after it opened, six different Off-Broadway shows featured gay themes, including Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a prison drama starring the newcomer Don Johnson in what Time described as a “grimly visible” onstage rape scene.
When the film of Boys opened in 1970, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate took a nineteen-year-old girl whom he had just met as his date. She was “very pretty, obviously bright, obviously a little shy.” He considered the choice of the movie “a bit of a gamble with someone I didn’t know at all, but what the hell.” He discovered it was “a challenge to the established order from the word go. I enjoyed the intensity of it. What was interesting was that my date obviously did too. She immediately began laughing at all the jokes, including, or even especially, the raunchiest ones. I was very much intrigued. It turned out to be an example of how liberation works across the spectrum. I suppose it was liberating for everyone to see those guys articulating those forbidden impulses so frankly.” Their first date was “quite chaste,” but three years later they were married—and they’ve been married ever since.
In 1970, the film was still startling in the heartland, but in Manhattan it lacked the shock value (and the live power) of the original. Jack Nichols and his lover Lige Clarke dismissed it in a joint review as “Bores in the Band.” Frank Kameny hated the play and the movie. He said his slogan “Gay is good” was intended as a “direct antidote to the mind-set among gays epitomized by that abomination, Boys in the Band.” However, the play continued to have a trickle-down effect: in 1972 a group of suburban fathers starred in a community production in Westchester. The Times reported that all of the amateur thespians—including two IBM men and an insurance salesman—“have learned to hug and kiss each other ‘without wanting to die inside,’ as one of them expressed it.” Tony Comitto, an IBM budgets manager, put it this way: “It boils down to recognition and escape. … In order for a guy to get up onstage and do it, he has to be secure in his own masculinity. If every person in the room thinks I’m queer for the two and a half hours I’m onstage, that’s great. But I’m not sure I want them to go out of the theater thinking that.”
Twenty-five years after the play first opened, Richard Kramer prepared himself for an anniversary interview with Crow
ley by screening the movie version of Boys for gay men in their forties, thirties, and twenties. Those in their forties told Kramer, “We’re not like that anymore.” The thirty-year-olds said, “We’re more like that than we’d like to admit.” And the twenty-year-olds said, “We’re just like that.”
Kramer’s survey suggests that despite all the changes of the last thirty years, most gay people still start out with tremendous self-hatred. Most of them go through a twenty-year process of self-acceptance. The big change after the last three decades is that genuine progress is no longer so unusual.
Harold’s birthday present in the play is a laconic $20-a-night hustler whom Harold immediately nicknames Tex. Murray Gitlin had asked Robert La Tourneaux to audition for the part after he met him at the Westside YMCA. “He was one of the most beautiful young men,” Gitlin recalled. La Tourneaux hesitated at first because he thought it was demeaning to play a hustler. But after the play became a hit, he repeated the role in London and Los Angeles, and again for the film.
La Tourneaux complained during the seventies that he never got any more good roles because he “was typecast as a gay hustler, and it was an image I couldn’t shake.” By 1978, he was working in a male porno theater in Manhattan, doing a one-man cabaret act.
Then life imitated art altogether: La Tourneaux became a hustler.
“He tried to extort money from someone who was supposedly a friend—probably a John,” said Githn. La Tourneaux was arrested and sent to the New York City prison on Rikers Island. There he tried to kill himself. Finally he was hospitalized at Bellevue where Gitlin went to visit him: “He was in a private room with leg shackles. And the guard guarding twenty-four hours a day, wearing a gown and mask. It was just awful. And Bob just kept getting sicker and sicker. It was just such a waste: he was so sweet and so beautiful and had so much going for him. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died. He was in Metropolitan Hospital, he was out of prison. And the nurse who was assigned to him had seen The Boys in the Band on television the night before. And he died in her arms. And to her, he was a star.”
THE BOYS IN THE BAND marked the beginning of the end of an era personified by gay men who adored Judy Garland (and carried a poodle as their “insignia,” as one character puts it in the play). Garland was an icon of a camp culture in which a group of people had a special devotion to otherwise enormously popular stars. Like so many other camp figures, Garland was an extremist, constantly alternating between exuberance and depression. At times her behavior looked like a parody of the dark side of gay life—the corrosive repetition of sex, drugs, and pathos which Michael had described in Boys. (“What’s more boring than a queen doing a Judy Garland imitation?” Michael asked at the beginning of the play. “A queen doing a Bette Davis imitation,” Donald replied.) When she was thirty-eight, Garland called her life “a combination of absolute chaos and absolute solitude.”
“I believe in doing what I can, crying when I must, laughing when I choose.” That was the most apt Noel Coward lyric she ever sang. When she chose to, this one-hundred-pound, five-foot-tall dynamo could charm anyone. Dirk Bogarde thought she was “without doubt … the funniest woman I have ever met.” She could also display a brutal self-regard: “I have a voice that hurts people when they think they want to be hurt. That’s all,” she told Bogarde. After Peter Lawford had introduced her to his brother-in-law Jack Kennedy, she campaigned for the future president among American troops in Germany in i960; afterward, the president took her calls in the White House whenever she needed cheering up. To cheer him up, at the end of every conversation, JFK always asked her to sing the last eight bars of “Over the Rainbow.” Her daughter Lisa Minnelli listened with astonishment whenever that happened.
Kennedy and Garland had both lived like figures from the sixties long before the decade began. “All my life I’ve done everything to excess”: that was her motto, and her method. It was also one reason why so many gay men identified with her. “There was a vulnerability there that anyone could appreciate,” said Minnelli. “If you were going through any kind of pain, you had company when you watched my mother.”
Garland loved men—and women—of all persuasions. She had five husbands, three children, and frequent lesbian affairs; she also got a special kick out of seducing gay and bisexual men. One of those was Tyrone Power, with whom she had a torrid affair during World War II. Her androgynous looks made her look like the “girl and boy next door,” Margo Jefferson observed. “She is at bottom a sort of early-twentieth-century kid,” said the critic Harold Clurman. “But the marks of the big city wounds are on her.”
Like many of her most devoted fans, Garland was a beguiling outlaw, someone who broke all the rules but still managed to make almost everyone love her. She was born Frances Ethel Gumm on June 10,1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Gumm made her debut two and a half years later singing a chorus of “Jingle Bells” on the stage of New Grand Theatre in her hometown. From that moment on, her fierce stage mother was certain that she would be a star. Twelve years later, daughter’s talent and mother’s determination merged to land her a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. For the next seventeen years, she “worked, slept, ate, appeared in public, dated, married and divorced” at Louis B. Mayer’s command, according to her biographer Anne Edwards. But she always denied a persistent rumor that she had been a victim of Mayer’s weakness for very young girls before she reached her fifteenth birthday.
In 1939 she tapped her ruby slippers together and planted herself inside the hearts of millions of Americans of all ages. “I sort of grew up with Judy Garland,” said Walter Clemons, who saw The Wizard of Oz when he was ten. “Judy Garland was a very big deal for my generation.” Garland thought, “The American people put their arms around me when I was a child performer, and they’ve kept them there—even when I was in trouble.” It was during the making of Oz that her lifelong addiction to uppers and downers began; the studio had provided her with them. “I don’t seem to either get up or go to sleep without them anymore,” she explained to Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West), who had inquired about the source of the seventeen-year-old girl’s limitless energy. For the rest of her life, her prodigious ingestion of these insidious pills fueled the psychodrama in which she was the permanent star.
Garland made a halfhearted attempt at suicide in 1947, slitting her wrist with a broken tumbler, but her mother was able to stem the bleeding with a Band-Aid. Even so, the actress was bundled off to her first sanitarium. Two years later she was given shock treatments to cure her addiction. Their effects wore off quickly. Then there was another suicide attempt, and she was fired from the movie set of Annie Get Your Gun. In 1950 and 1952, she tried to cut her throat; in 1957, it was her wrist again. Each time a new incident was reported by the tabloids, fanatical gay fans wore Band-Aids on their own wrists in solidarity. At the end of 1959, her drinking and drug taking forced her into Doctor’s Hospital in Manhattan with a bloated liver four times its normal size. She was also fifty pounds overweight—150 percent of her usual self. Seven weeks later, she had lost thirty pounds, but she left the hospital in a wheelchair and was told that she would always be a semi-invalid. As usual, her doctors had underestimated her.
“I think she beat on life,” said Arthur Laurents. “Like most of those divas, she was both sides of the coin. They cling to you and they suck the blood out of you. She was a tough customer.”
What redeemed Garland was her gigantic talent—a huge voice out of a compact body—and the ability to make every note sound effortless, just when everyone was certain the game was over. “She ate up music like a vacuum cleaner,” said the songwriter and producer Saul Chaplin. The director Stanley Kramer believed that with every performance, she declared, “Here is my heart, break it.”
Laurents found Garland much more exciting to watch than Barbra Streisand “because with Streisand you know nothing will go wrong. She may be in the flesh, but you’re seeing film—and literally, too: everybody is looking back over their shoulder
s at the TelePrompters. Judy Garland was always naked: ‘Here I am. Throw me your slings and arrows or give me your hearts!’”
To Judy Barnett, a singer-songwriter who came of age just as Garland’s career was ending, “the range of her talent was extraordinary—she could act, she could dance, she could sing. The gay community was just one facet of a much broader audience. After all, this woman was a star from the time she was fourteen until she died.”
By the winter of 1961, the wheelchair had long since been thrown away and Garland had begun her umpteenth comeback—a fourteen-city tour that opened in Dallas. Stanley Kramer was considering casting her in a small part in Judgment at Nuremberg, so he traveled to Texas to see her perform. There he discovered that her legendary connection to her audience remained entirely intact. “I saw staid citizens acting like bobby-soxers at an Elvis Presley show,” said Kramer. “There’s nobody in the entertainment world today, actor or singer, who can run the complete range of emotions, from utter pathos to power … the way she can.” Garland’s cameo was a triumph. “I could never cheat on a performance, or coast through,” Garland explained, because “my emotions are involved.” In April 1961, she performed at Constitution Hall in Washington, and the president invited her for a quick visit to the White House.
The Gay Metropolis Page 26
