Editor in Chief’s Letter
“Friends are lifelines, replacing families that may shun us”
Relationships are tricky. Whether platonic, sexual or romantic, they require patience and nurturing if they’re to evolve.
As we change and grow, so do our connections with people, and encouraging each other’s mutual growth is the test of any relationship — be it with a partner, friend or family member. Sometimes we irk our boyfriend if we’re having a rough day. We may irritate friends with our habits. Or family members can rile us with a simple comment.
Lucky as I am to have a caring birth family, they don’t know as much about my personal life as my chosen family — the friends we allow into our lives. That’s not because I love my biological family any less, but our chosen families understand and see us in a way in which our parents and siblings may struggle to.
For some LGBTQ people, friends are lifelines, replacing families that may shun or shame them. Our social networks become a safe space we can escape to. It’s one of the reasons I find Mart Crowley’s play, The Boys in the Band, so absorbing.
When the curtain rose on the first performance of the play in 1968, Crowley could not have possibly imagined the impact it would continue to have on gay culture five decades later. The play’s first run was a hit and enjoyed more than 1,000 performances, before being made into a film in 1970. Then, the recently formed Gay Liberation Front, who were championing queer pride and visibility, protested against the original film’s depiction of queer men who they considered to be self-loathing stereotypes. With queer representation only recently being addressed in any meaningful way, LGBTQ people have often noticed a disconnect between the queer stories they see on screen and their own experience.
Nuance is vital for context, and the fact is, life for many gay men in the late 1960s was challenging at best. Stonewall’s uprising had yet to occur. The Pride movement wasn’t even an idea. Relationships were conducted in secret, and if discovered could have cost a person their livelihood. When homosexuality was mentioned in the news, it was in reference to sinners and degenerates.
The Boys in the Band – now a major Netflix movie from uber-producer Ryan Murphy with an all-star cast – features a range of characters who are at varying degrees of balance with their identity. Critics’ attention often focuses on the two, maybe three ‘self-loathing’ characters, while the other urgent topics are too often brushed over: substance abuse, love, desire, monogamy vs open relationships all feature – subjects that are as relevant to gay male identity today as they were in the late 1960s.
Yes, the story takes a mean turn. And as anybody who has ever clashed with a sibling or had a cross word with a friend will know, we can be exceptionally harsh to the people we love the most. Sometimes when we’re hurting or lost, we take it out on the people closest to us because we try to push away the love we feel undeserving of.
As actor Andrew Rannells says of his own friendships in our lead story: “There are times when we’re brutally honest [with each other] in a way that nobody else is, in a way that’s sometimes cool, and sometimes is not.” (p. 42) It seems we don’t like to look at ourselves too closely in a mirror.
The Boys in the Band raises some vital questions that are as pertinent to us today as they ever were: how do gay people support each other as a community? What’s behind our often sassy/bitchy defence mechanism? What pressures are there to define our lives by heteronormative standards? How safe are we from homophobia?
As the old adage goes: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”