The Boys in the Band

Mart Crowley’s play ​‘The Boys in the Band’ was a huge hit when it was first per­formed Off-Broad­way in 1968. At that time, sto­ries about the LGBT+ com­mu­ni­ty were few and far between, and while they aren’t near­ly as rare nowa­days on stage or screen, there is still a unique pow­er in hav­ing a such sto­ries brought to life by an entire­ly gay cast.

Set in a pre-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, Netflix’s The Boys in the Band brings us into the lives of a group of gay men in New York City whose only con­cern seems to be the pur­suit of accep­tance. The occa­sion for their gath­er­ing is a birth­day par­ty thrown by Michael (Jim Par­son), a clos­et­ed Catholic screen­writer whose biggest wor­ry is his hair­line, for his pompous friend and ver­bal spar­ring part­ner Harold (Zachary Quinto).

As the guests start com­ing in, we meet a for­mer hookup of Michael’s, Don­ald (Matt Bomer), a dec­o­ra­tor with an explo­sive per­son­al­i­ty, Emory (Robin de Jesús), the well-read and soft-spo­ken Bernard (Michael Ben­jamin Wash­ing­ton), the flir­ta­tious Lar­ry (Andrew Ran­nells), and his new lover the divorcee school­teacher Hank (Tuc Watkins), along­side the Cow­boy strip­per (Char­lie Carv­er) Emory hired as a present for Harold.

The room is tense, with the con­stant cur­rent of gay bitch­i­ness which cuts through the air per­fect­ly encap­su­lat­ing the inter­nalised self-loathing these men would have been sub­ject to out­side of a room like this. The ten­sion is dialled up fur­ther when Michael’s room­mate from col­lege, Alan (Bri­an Hutchin­son), a sup­pos­ed­ly hap­pi­ly mar­ried fam­i­ly man, crash­es the par­ty unan­nounced after hav­ing had a break­down over the phone to Michael ear­li­er that day.

While the film makes no effort to hide its stage ori­gins (not only from the orig­i­nal 1968 ver­sion but also the 2018 anniver­sary edi­tion this same cast put on), the sin­gle room set­ting and heavy dia­logue are of no detri­ment to it – on the con­trary, it makes for engag­ing view­ing, like if Mur­der on the Ori­ent Express was about unearthing each character’s deep­est secrets instead of solv­ing the cen­tral mystery.

In an emo­tion­al­ly manip­u­la­tive move, Michael sug­gests a game where each play­er has to phone the per­son they have always loved and con­fess their feel­ings. This melo­dra­mat­ic premise gives way to emo­tion­al speech­es and flash­backs, with the char­ac­ters’ indi­vid­ual cir­cum­stances adding a pal­pa­ble sense of anguish and anger.

It should be a no-brain­er, real­ly, but The Boys in the Band proves that we should no longer be will­ing to accept straight actors play­ing gay char­ac­ters. Indeed, it’s pre­cise­ly because these actors so deeply empathise with their char­ac­ters that the film works as well as it does. As James Mason tells Judy Gar­land in A Star Is Born: ​“You’re singing for your­self and the boys in the band.”