"He’s so pulled together he wouldn’t show any emotion if he was in a plane crash" – Michael, The Boys In The Band

Any film that contains dialogue like that deserves high praise. This oft-maligned gay classic is chockers with them, biting quips and harsh wits that sometime grate, but never bore. A two hour alcoholic talk-party - an overpopulated, gay Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf - it uncovers gay men at their sizzling emotional and intellectual cores – before suburbanality drove theatricality into the ground, and gym workouts and GI haircuts became the assimilative, cowardly norm.

Straight from the stage, William Friedkin's adaptation of Matt Crowley’s The Boys In The Band is all character and dialogue and hit-the-marks emotion, and it sometimes gets a little hard to take. Not because it’s too stagey, but because it has a bare theatricality that could be read as nihilism. No one on screen cops out on anything – if they’re tormented and depressed, they get drunker and drunker until things start getting smashed, including their friends’ egos, while if they’re promiscuous and unfaithful, they stand their ground and defend their actions, not crumble and cry and look for a way to change and be forgiven, or worse, run to a counsellor.

Modern reviewers fall over themselves to explain how dated and often unrealistic the material is, that "not all gay guys are like this" and that "attitudes have changed since 1968".

Oh, really?



Not all gay guys are like the characters in this film, sure, but many are, I’m much like Michael myself. Shun this pessimistic film all you like, but facts are facts: not all gay guys are proud, happy and upwardly mobile.

At least The Boys In The Band gave its characters honesty, and real communication skills – they call a spade a spade, and call each other names. None of them are happy, and few of them are successful, but at least they aren’t living in RainbowFlagWorld, skipping along in a crystal meth haze, pondering the pattern of their next bicep tattoo, and making sure they keep it light, before they suddenly up and decide to adopt a child, or run for public office, childishly blaming homophobia for every obstacle they encounter along the way.

The snappy, snipy queens of The Boys in The Band eyeball life close-up and don’t let a fact or an idea slip through unnoticed. Brave and intelligent, give me these guys anyday – I’d rather go to one of their shred tearing parties and feel what it was like to sit in a room full of distinct and unique personalities, than sit at a coffee shop and talk shit with some robot who may as well be anyone.

Belted by AIDS and neutered by community, gay culture is dead. In the period this movie came from, it was mordantly alive.