WHEN it was announced that the 1970s iconic cinema on gay angst and allure would be revived, I could almost hear Bette Davis as Margo Channing hissing: “It won’t play.”
The 2020 iteration of The Boys in the Band is dated not so much because of its content per se but the context within which we view this film at present. So much has changed about homosexuality ever since the days before the Stonewall riots that the fears, taboos and anxiety of seven friends gathering for the birthday of one of them assume the patina of nostalgia and historical curiosity.
Two perspectives are involved in this introspection: the way societies look at gay people and how cinemas depict them. These tandem of perspectives are closely intertwined that gay people—or homosexuals—are said to have come out of the closet twice. The first is from the closet in their homes, in their families and communities; the second is from the films that had shuttered them in euphemisms or comic tirades.
The film remains the same: it is about those friends, plus a hustler who is to be the gift from one to the birthday boy, gathering at an apartment of Charlie.
They would have handled themselves beautifully despite and maybe because of their differences, give and take the presence of this male prostitute who is charming because he really does not know anything outside his profession. But, suddenly, somebody calls Charlie. It is his friend from college. And he is straight.
The odyssey of The Boys in the Band begins from a gathering where everyone is happy or has expectations of a lovely party. But when you put a group of characters armored with wit and capable of parrying repartees with repartees, then you get a night that is caustic. Everyone is charming up to a point; everyone is tragic to a greater degree. These were the stereotypes prevalent in those days about gays.
Everyone speaks lines from camp scenes. Anytime, one expects either Bette Davis to walk in or Judy Garland to burst into a song. Lines are thrown for emphasis instead of empathy; dialogues glitter with beaded allusions obscure even for the greatest scholars of the classics unless they happen to be, well, gay. Heads are thrown following an insult; hands whisk away an opinion; eyes burn through sad jokes.
It is a night where people are killed by words and not by guns. In this reunion are murderers of memories because these men, it seems, are hating each other forever.
The past, for them, is either gilded in rococo or sharpened by a scimitar slicing through one’s recollection of a thousand and one nights they claim happened.
But Scheherazade has blurred the realities for the sake of romance. Those nights are at best suspect. At worse, their remembrance of things past is a one-way ticket to the blues.
Long after one of them had the guts to call his first love, he nurses that regret the rest of the night. He, like the others, are breaching the rule about one-sided love—never revisit the site where your love was killed.
We know they are friends but all throughout, we ask why they are friends.
We know they love each other but they would rather play a game that would resurrect loves that have ruined them in their youth.
Michael, the host, is so sure of himself only when he couches his opinions in epigrams. As Michael, Jim Parsons is a relentless traffic cop managing his friends as if they are always breaking pedestrian lanes and driving past red social lights. He is the gay assaulting a gay for his gayness.
To his acerbic host is the man celebrating his birthday, Harold, who, in the movement and voice of Zachary Quinto, is Marlene Dietrich on marijuana and hallucinogen. Zachary ululates rather than talks, a priestess with the last word on human sacrifice at the altar of friendship.
Robin de Jesus is the flamboyant gay male. He seems to court the label “faggot” and subverts it by being one, except that he adds the panache of all those Latina film goddesses of the 1950s. His is a small role but who cares? He gets to mouth the declaration of human rights made famous by Gloria Swanson/Norma Desmond: “I am ready for my closeup.”
In this present cinematic dispensation where “Boy Love” runs as dominant theme in mainstream stories in mainstream mode and viewed by a mainstream audience, where boys tongue-kiss boys to the
cheering squad of loving female fans, the closeted aspect of The Boys in the Band has remained a curiosity. But we should understand: its story is set in that period when gay men (and gay women) were not allowed to display their person in public. Thus, this party happens inside that apartment. When the door bursts open, and a couple (man and woman) sees Emory in one of his florid gestures, the look of disdain from the two is disconcerting. More disturbing, however, is the fear on the faces of the gay men.
Helping this film age gracefully is the sterling cast: Matt Bomer is Donald. His character is so good-looking in the male sense of it that the hetero in the audience would perhaps pray that he be straight. But like the rest of the actors—who were all the members of the cast of the Broadway revival—he is openly out and gay. Brian Hutchison, on the one hand, is the straight friend who is so straight we look up to the gods to make him gay just so the narrative can have poetic justice. His Alan is vulnerable but, at the same time, he provides that bit of humanity in the film. He should because all the other characters are survivors and he is not.
The Boys in the Band is directed by Joe Mantello, based on the 1968 play of the same name by Mart Crowley, who also wrote the screenplay alongside Ned Martel. Crowley had previously adapted The Boys in the Band for a 1970 film version directed by William Friedkin (The French Connection and The Exorcist). The film also stars Andrew Rannells, Charlie Carver, Robin Michael Benjamin Washington and Tuc Watkins.
Ryan Murphy is the producer along with David Stone and Ned Martel. Before the film could be released, Mart Crowley passed away on March 7, 2020. The film is dedicated to his memory.
The film was released on September 30 by Netflix.
Available for streaming is a special, The Boys in the Band: Something Personal, which shows Crowley with the other personalities behind the revival, talking about the film and its legacy and contribution not only to the social history of gay movement but also to the notion of free speech and artistic freedom.