The playwright who revealed gay life

When Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band opened in New York City in 1968, many theatergoers were stunned by its unapologetic depiction of gay life. Although it was an open secret that leading playwrights such as Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams were gay, theater until that point had tended to tiptoe around a character’s homosexuality—or demonize it. Crowley tore open the closet with his first play, which featured nine gay men at a birthday party who lose their filters as the booze flows. With lines like “You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse,” The Boys in the Band captured LGBT pessimism and paranoia one year before the Stonewall riots. It ran for 1,001 performances off-Broadway. “All the plays I had ever seen on the subject were stereotyped, sensational, embarrassed, or evasive,” said Crowley, who was gay. “I tried to be thoughtful and honest.”

Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Miss., to an alcoholic father and a drug addict mother, said The New York Times. “I always resented that Eugene O’Neill already had my best plots,” he said in 2002. After attending an all-boys Catholic high school, Crowley studied drama at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. “He was home in

Mississippi for the filming of director Elia Kazan’s movie Baby Doll,” said The Washington Post, and “talked his way into a job as a production assistant.” In 1966, Crowley was “broke, unemployed, and frequently drunk” and living in New York City when he read an essay by critic Stanley Kauffmann that lamented the “disguised homosexual influence” in theater and called on dramatists to address gay themes head-on. The essay “amounted to a kind of dare” for Crowley, who wrote The Boys in the Band in five weeks. Casting took longer. Many actors declined roles, fearing the production would be a career killer. The groundbreaking play was condemned by some critics for presenting characters who were “self-loathing and stereotypical,” said RollingStone .com. Crowley wrote a film adaptation in 1970 and several more plays, but for decades his role in the gay rights movement was overshadowed by playwrights such as Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner. Fifty years after its debut, The Boys in the Band finally arrived on Broadway, produced by Hollywood powerhouse Ryan Murphy. When the play won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Revival, Crowley finally felt accepted by the gay community. “You gave me something I’ve never had before,” he told Murphy, “which is peace.”