Oh yes, I remember it well...
This morning, I turned on Channel 1, an all news television cable station in New York City, to watch the news and weather for today, and discovered a Sunday morning program was on about the week on Broadway. They had a piece about a new documentary called, "Making the Boys" that will be released in a few weeks. The program interviewed the author of the play Mart Crowley, and the young African American gay documentary maker. The conversation about the play jogged my memory.
It was 1970, and during my summer break from college, I went to see the movie adaptation of the play, with my childhood friend David, who had been my frequent sex partner since we met in the boy scouts, seven years earlier.
I realized that I was gay, and enjoyed the male form from a very early age, but I was never a part of the gay community, and I found the film both distressing and enlightening. Many of the stereotypical homosexual characters in the film, jarred my senses, as I could not relate to their outward appearances and affects, but at the same time, I did relate to things that they were saying. The film entertained me, but scared me too, as I did not want to become an effeminate, alcoholic "old queen", when I became older. But the play had so many truisms, about life, and particularly gay life.
It was a powerful play, and now over 40 years later, I can still feel the raw emotions that Mart Crowley, and his amazing cast portrayed in this most important production. I will definitely look for the new documentary when it is soon released.
I found this brief article about the upcoming film.
http://bandofthebes.typepad.com/ban...ary-on-mart-crowley-emerging-gay-culture.html
Dear Mikeyank,
With all of its outrageous stereotypes and its total disregard for "pc" at a time when there was no definition for the concept of "political correctness", I eagerly welcomed this movie at my local theatre "The Boys in the Band" in Atlanta, GA (
where I was working briefly in 1969 - 70). Because of its raw emotions displayed throughout both movies, I had to put it on equal parity with Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton's classic film "
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (
an all time favorite movie of mine, whose dialog I knew word-for-word). Long before video recorders were commonplace, studios issued 33 1/3 LP records of the complete dialog of Elizabeth Taylor’s classic portrayal in "...Virginia Woolf". One of my best friends in college had a copy of this album and I must have worn the grooves out hearing it so many, many times. Because of the unique subject matter, "
Boys in the Band" probably hit closest to me, emotionally and sexually speaking. Although both films in my humble opinion were dramatic triumphs, light-years ahead of their time socially speaking, and featured what I viewed as two truly iconic
tour de force performances in my opinion both then, as now.
When you grow up in a culture with no vaguely realistic "gay role models" either to emulate or to reject, then you find yourself highly receptive to whatever role model is offered you, as a baseline for you to construct your gay sexual identity. At the time, this movie was "just about it" when it came to presenting a variety of gay role models for those living in outlying areas with no readily visible gay sub-culture, like in middle USA. While there were gay actors depicted in the earliest of silent movies or talkies in the early 1900’s, they were merely dismissed as being fools and falling in neat "categories" such as "
light in the loafers" or "
limp wristed" or ”
fancy boys” or some equally negative stereotype no reasonable person would deliberately set their goals to emulate. Those earliest movie gay roles were designed to be scoffed at or ridiculed.
People who know me well often have asked me in a kind but perplexed way, even today, “…
why I am so consumed with self hate”? My immediate response is that I do not consciously feel to be self-hating. But this question has persisted to haunt me since I was in college, being asked by the kindest of professors why I was so filled with self hate? This stain or negative vibe I exude on my personal character is both
indelible and
unwanted, yet it still persists. All I can say is when growing up, nothing in my culture or religious affiliation could reconcile my being Gay as an acceptable or positive lifestyle. That suicide was almost a certainty in my future in this necessarily self-destructive lifestyle “choice”. This left many young gay males not currently sexually active feeling understandably resentful for their “natural gay inclinations” and full of “self-loathing”. I felt at the time, God could certainly not have been so very cruel to in me personally to thrust this overwhelming burden upon me, or in other words “to play this dirty trick on me at birth”. Back then, I felt I had done nothing to deserve this lifetime sentence. At the time I first began seriously questioning my sexual orientation in college, I found the mere thought of my being gay as something no less than “abhorrent” and “akin to an incurable and disfiguring disease”.
Coincidentally,I feel this fully explains many years later in the 1980's why I was so mesmerized by the movie “The Elephant Man”. I so personally identified with the main character when I saw the movie at a theatre. Then, I rented the video to view it privately at home. I sobbed inconsolably for hours upon viewing this tragic portrayal of a man in the 1800’s who was so disfigured he had to wear a hop sack bag covering his head to exist in the shadows of London’s poor, unable to work except as an occasional circus “freak show attraction” or beg for his existence. That didn’t bode well for having a positive self-concept, now did it?
Due to the intolerance of the times and even today living in the "Bible belt" in the south, this understandably led many gay individuals to a state of denial because at the time we had no “more positive” role models to pattern our self from with limited personal experiences and became for many a necessary defense mechanism for their survival. I wasn't sexually active at age 21 while living in Atlanta. Because of my self-hate issues, I felt unworthy of love and destined to live out a solitary life alone. My first actual completed sex act was not until age 25 in my home town. The straight guy I shared my first experience with was nothing more to me than a longtime acquaintance and drinking buddy, who had engaged in a little foreplay three years earlier (with me at age 22), until he ran out of my dorm room and back to his estranged and momentarily “separated” wife’s arms. While I lived in Atlanta for some 9 months in 1969-70, I would daily cruise Piedmont Park endless in my spare time, never to actually meet the first person much less even to share something as simple as a Coke or a mere conversation. It was there where I first witnessed two men kissing passionately in the car cruising the park just ahead of me. To date at age 62, I have never ever shared one, not even one sexual encounter with another gay guy. Those so invested in having sex with straight guys may not fully understand this devastating absense of essential "gay male" attention in my life. I feel I have been cloistered, as if in a monastery, my whole life, having never truthfully self-actualized my authentic gay sexual identity with another gay man.
I know “The Boys in the Band” was criticized at the time by Gay groups for it’s portrayal of “negative stereotypes” (an early precursor of today's political correctness) but, when that is all that you are given to identify with in your youth, you can’t totally disregard it. For all of its warts,
I dearly love this movie as it played a pivotal role in my sexual development and identity. I personally think of it as an essential time-capsule that every gay guy should experience at least once so that they have some concept of where we, as a gay sub-culture, emerged from.
Sincerely,
Stimpy
