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A Brief History of Gay Theater, in Three Acts

On the return of ‘The Boys in the Band’ and why it matters more than ever.

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From left: “The Boys in the Band” co-producer RYAN MURPHY in a Salvatore Ferragamo coat, price on request, (866) 337-7242, and his own hat and glasses. Actor ROBIN DE JESÚS in a Berluti polo, $1,010, (212) 439-6400, Officine Générale jeans, $245, officinegenerale.com, and vintage belt. Actor MICHAEL BENJAMIN WASHINGTON in a Club Monaco sweater, $140, clubmonaco.com, Levi’s jeans, $70, levi.com, and his own belt. Actor ANDREW RANNELLS in a Brunello Cucinelli jacket, $2,195, brunellocucinelli.com, Ralph Lauren sweater, $995, ralphlauren.com, and Frame jeans, $199, frame-store.com. Actor TUC WATKINS in a Todd Snyder jacket, $1,000, mrporter.com.Credit...Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh. Styled by Jay Massacret

ONE EVENING NOT long after “The Boys in the Band” had its Off Broadway premiere in April 1968, Laurence Luckinbill, who played Hank, brought his tool kit to work. Theater Four, as the joint was called, was a dowdy old converted church in a part of Manhattan that the play’s author, Mart Crowley, called a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” But Luckinbill wasn’t lugging tools to make repairs. Instead, he drilled a hole in a piece of the set called a tormentor flat, about waist-high, so that he and his eight castmates, standing backstage, could get a glimpse of whoever was sitting sixth row center: the best seats in the house. Over the coming weeks the actors took turns peeping at the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev. Even New York City’s glamorous mayor, John Lindsay, showed up.

This was an unexpected turn of events. “The Boys in the Band” was very much a ghetto play, a peephole aimed at gay men. In writing it, Crowley had deliberately taken up the challenge tossed down by the theater critic Stanley Kauffmann, who in a 1966 New York Times essay headlined “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises” asked why that era’s most famous gay playwrights — meaning Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and William Inge — didn’t write about themselves and leave straights alone. His premise was faulty: Characters like Martha and George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” are not, as he suggested, gay couples in masquerade. Nor do homosexuals suffer from an “emotional-psychological illness,” as he casually mentions — for this was an era in which such public slurs were chic and permissible, especially in the guise of literary criticism. (In The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth derided Albee’s 1964 drama “Tiny Alice” for its “ghastly pansy rhetoric.”) Still, there was no denying that frank plays about gay male life had never reached the mainstream, never penetrated the circles in which Kauffmanns and Roths and socialites frolicked.

So Crowley wrote the best and funniest and gayest play he could, about nine gay men (or maybe eight and a half) at a birthday party. Though some of the men finesse the ambient homophobia of the time better than others, almost all of them suffer from the self-hatred that seemed then, and maybe now, to infiltrate even the best-defended personality. (“I had enough self-hatred built up in me to go around,” Crowley says. “I didn’t need Stanley Kauffmann to tell me that.”) And no one is spared the pressure cooker of the play’s dramatic construction: When the well-oiled host forces the guests to play a painful game — requiring them to phone someone they have loved and confess their feelings — the tart humor of the first half turns bitter. In a Times review that thought nothing of flinging phrases like “screamingly fag” and “fairy queens shouting bitchicisms,” Clive Barnes nonetheless acknowledged that “The Boys in the Band” was “quite an achievement” and “a gripping, if painful experience.”

Revisited 50 years later, it still is. It leaps off the page like fat from a wok. That’s one of the reasons it remains a classic gay play, despite its overpowering association with the 1960s. (The dialogue crackles with the casual racism and misogyny of the time, much as Kauffmann’s prose glitters with homophobia.) Still, the revival of “The Boys in the Band” — making its belated Broadway debut in a slimmed-down one-act version that opens on May 31 — is more than just an acknowledgment of its theatricality. It is also an acknowledgment of a larger urgency about the representation of gay men in popular entertainment: a moment that, in the theater at least, is both springboard and eulogy. At a time when many of the classic gay plays are returning to the Broadway stage — “Boys in the Band,” “Angels in America” and “Torch Song Trilogy” among them — almost no new ones are on the horizon to join them.

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Read T a Poem | Michael Benjamin Washington

The actor reads "The Unsung" by Keenan Teddy Smith.

For the Old Port built and built again: I am sure you are indifferent to me. We are kin, though; we are both refuge and warmth, competition and hope, connected by seas. your boats here are plentiful, but your huddled masses are greater; I feel no one sings the songs of our kind anymore, no one notes our role in safe passage. Forgive me if I’ve been too invested, too idealistic about our sisterhood. Perhaps it’s our shared brownness, our shared tides, our shared resilience against time and the fickleness of men that made us so connected as if I could leap from notre dame and descend into us with love, our songs and sorrows guiding me over rooftops and café smoke plumes. Unsung saints, lying open for the world, if the lost and found won’t buttress us with honor, we shall always hold each other.

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The actor reads "The Unsung" by Keenan Teddy Smith.CreditCredit...Brendan Stumpf

There’s an irony in this, as the same qualities that made those classics classic also made them, in their original runs, almost impossible to stage. No one wanted to touch “The Boys in the Band” at first: no producers, no theater owners, no actors. When Luckinbill, then 33, agreed to play Hank — the “straightest” of the gay men, who’d left his wife and children — his agent said he might as well bid goodbye to his career. She was, mind you, the play’s agent too, a lesbian herself. But so heavy and lingering was the perfume of gayness coming off the project that even a heterosexual actor like Luckinbill was thought to be committing theatrical suicide to book it. Mostly out of friendship for Crowley, a college chum, he did.

Luckinbill went on to have a very full career onstage and on screen — and so, to everyone’s surprise, did “The Boys in the Band.” As the sixth-row presence of Jackie and Groucho suggests, it crossed over into mainstream awareness and even found success, running for 1,001 performances. William Friedkin’s faithful movie version, released in 1970 and starring the entire stage cast, turned it into a touchstone of gay style and suffering for gays and straights well beyond New York. As such, it is without doubt the first play in the American gay male theatrical canon.

I write that admiring many of its spiritual forebears, from Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” in 1945 to Robert Anderson’s “Tea and Sympathy” in 1953 to the early works of Doric Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick and many others who helped spark an efflorescence of downtown gay drama centered at Caffe Cino, with its makeshift milk-crate stage, starting in 1958.

But while building on those — and, Crowley says, on Arthur Laurents’s screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, “Rope,” in which two gay men murder a classmate for sport — “The Boys in the Band” has had the more consequential gay trajectory. If you doubt it, look at the names involved in the 50th-anniversary revival: Jim Parsons plays the party’s host, Michael; Matt Bomer is Donald, Michael’s ambivalent ex; Zachary Quinto is Harold, the “ugly pockmarked Jew fairy” birthday boy; and Andrew Rannells is Larry, one half of the play’s only established (if iffy) couple. They and the rest of the starry cast are successful, openly gay men, as are the producers, Ryan Murphy and David Stone, and the director, Joe Mantello.

This was a deliberate statement, meant to acknowledge how far the world has come since 1968. “The guys that are the leads,” Murphy says, “are the first generation of gay actors who said, ‘We’re going to live authentic lives and hope and pray our careers remain on track’ — and they have. I find that profound.”

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A still from the set of William Friedkin’s 1970 film version of “The Boys in the Band,” which starred the entire theatrical cast.Credit...Mptv Images

Crowley could never have predicted that. In 1968 he sent his play into a world that, however much it might laugh at his gay zingers, seemed likely to remain forever and fundamentally hostile. Mantello points out the startling paradox that all the gay members of the original company felt compelled to stay in the closet “even though they were in a groundbreaking play about gay men.”

But the way the world sees gay people and the way gay people see themselves have changed so much, and of late so fast, that plays from even just a few years ago can seem like Ken Burns documentaries. In one sense, then, the classic gay plays are educational: reminding a complacent generation of the struggles and tragedies (and fabulousness) that underlie the glossy image of rapid progress. The normalization of gayness that has in most ways been a boon has also shrunk the historical eye to, well, another peephole. Further progress, much needed, requires a fuller view. And who’s to say the momentous changes of the last 50 years can’t be swiftly undone?

“The Boys in the Band” helped incite those changes, allowing for its reappearance now as a triumph of liberation instead of an embarrassment to the liberators. The mistake the play’s many gay critics have made is in thinking that transformative art should be a form of boosterism. Rather, transformative art is needling, Cassandra-like, telling uncomfortable truths you ignore at your peril. “The Boys in the Band,” once seen, couldn’t be unseen. “The people who criticize the play have the luxury to do so because of the play,” Mantello says.

Indeed, part of the reason “The Boys in the Band” so clearly marks the start of the canon is the way it was swallowed up almost instantly by what it helped to spawn. In the aftermath of the Stonewall riots of 1969, while the play still ran, its portrayal of gay male life came to be seen as counterrevolutionary, which was exactly backward, if understandable in light of the rebranding underway. The characters’ promiscuous, boa-flinging, “Oh, Mary”-spouting, drown-your-troubles-in-a-vodka-bottle histrionics were distinctly off-message during the years when gay men were trying to cultivate lawmakers and police with their new images as activists or pillars of the community, not of Sodom. Even Albee, who Crowley suspects invested secretly in the original production, once tarred the play as “a highly skillful work that I despised” because it “did serious damage to a burgeoning gay respectability movement.”

Were there not nellies at Stonewall? In any case, when respectability came, it came at an awful price. AIDS, which drove the last nail in the play’s reputational coffin, also killed off most of its cast. Between 1984 and 1993, five of the gay men in the original production, as well as the director, Robert Moore, and the producer, Richard Barr, died of the disease.

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From left: Rannells. Watkins. Actor ZACHARY QUINTO in a Salvatore Ferragamo coat, price on request. Actor MATT BOMER in a Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket, $4,890, ysl.com, Ermenegildo Zegna polo, $565, (212) 421-4488, and Mr P. pants, $250, mrporter.com. Actor CHARLIE CARVER in a vintage Lee jacket, Officine Générale T-shirt, $117, and Simon Miller jeans, $375, simonmillerusa.com.Credit...Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh. Styled by Jay Massacret

AND YET AIDS, with its gaudy ironies, would create the conditions that turned a “respectability movement” into a civil rights revolution. It would also create the conditions that produced — even necessitated — most of the indisputably canonical gay plays that succeeded “The Boys in the Band.” Because both the disease and the revolution were centered in New York, the country’s theatrical capital, it makes sense that those plays are all set in the city. And because I’m writing about plays that have shaped gay male life, it’s not surprising that all the playwrights I name are gay men.

It hardly needs arguing that one of them is Tony Kushner, whose play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” opened on Broadway in 1993. A revival, starring Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield, opens on March 25 — but unlike “The Boys in the Band,” “Angels” never really went away, never suffered a Siberian holiday of political reeducation. Perhaps that’s because Kushner, putting so much into it, ensured it would always have something to put out. If you don’t like the story of faithless Louis leaving his lover, Prior, who develops AIDS, there’s the one about the closeted lawyer (and Trump fixer) Roy Cohn, denying the disease outright. Or perhaps you prefer something more aeronautical? There’s one of those title angels for that, bearing a cryptic mission for mankind. Plus a heroic drag queen, a drug-addled wife, rabbis, Mormons and Ethel Rosenberg.

It’s what I call a goulash work, though Kushner prefers the term lasagna: a dish that almost melts the borders of form in its quest for sublimity. It is also, in its more intimate scenes, so funny and argumentative, so vatic, so sharp and so unconcerned with gay respectability that you can see a straight line leading back to “The Boys in the Band.” Both plays, after all, are about closet cases and fidelity and gay men taking care of one another — or not.

I retract the “straight line,” though; more aptly, it’s a bent one, passing through other canonical plays, each contributing an element of style or stagecraft along the way. In the 25 years between “The Boys in the Band” and “Angels in America” there are two, or possibly three, by my accounting. The two are Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” a collection of three related one-act plays first seen on Broadway in 1982, and Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” from 1985. The third is Paul Rudnick’s “Jeffrey,” which — in a 1992 replay of Crowley’s 1968 experience — could not at first find a producer, a theater or a cast.

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Read T a Poem | Joe Mantello

The director reads "Morning Scene" by Jameson Fitzpatrick.

Opposite him at this table again and through the windows the city glittering, surreal as a scale model, the city in miniature – only it moves in a real way, because it is real. One of the windows is open, some construction down on the street drones like a distant vacuum. It’s warm for January. Still his apartment has that dreamlike quality of feeling like home though I know it’s not. Not mine anymore – but how many people get to visit the past without hurting anything? To come back and drink the same coffee from the same never-quite-clean cup.

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The director reads "Morning Scene" by Jameson Fitzpatrick.CreditCredit...Brendan Stumpf

What makes “Jeffrey” just a possible third? It’s a comedy, and comedies, short of Shakespeare’s or Wilde’s, are unstable. Over time, they seem to decompose more easily than dramas, revealing off flavors. True, “Jeffrey” is not an ordinary comedy; it’s a comedy about AIDS, and a romantic comedy at that — a genre that shouldn’t have been possible, and wasn’t until Rudnick decided it was needed. “Comedy is often the only feasible antidote to a completely justifiable, but not very entertaining hopelessness,” he once wrote. “Sometimes, a wisecrack is a weapon.”

So “Jeffrey,” which ran for two years Off Broadway and was made into a movie in 1995, is crafted like a drama, squeezing incompatible things together in a small space and forcing them to collide. But because Rudnick’s characters — an interior decorator, a bartender, a chorus boy in “Cats” — are professionally amusing, so is the result. Jeffrey himself is a gay cater-waiter in his 30s who, rather than worry about what is safe, decides to remain celibate forever. Everyone around him is horrified at this “one real blasphemy — the refusal of joy,” even as one of his friends is dying. “How dare you give up sex,” says a priest, “when there are children in Europe who can’t get a date!”

“Jeffrey” is full of merriment but you always understand that the domestic problems faced by couples in straight romantic comedies have here been raised to an existential plane. “If you want comedies to be really funny you have to have the biggest possible obstacles,” Rudnick says. “And that’s what AIDS handed me and everyone else.”

In a way, then, “Jeffrey” is the inverse of Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” and a crucial counterweight to it. When “The Normal Heart” opened at the Public Theater just four years after the first reports of what would soon be called AIDS, it felt less like a play than like war reporting. Kramer was nothing if not embedded; this was his own story, lightly fictionalized in the character of Ned Weeks and happening in real time. Emphasizing that, the set design by Eugene Lee and Keith Raywood featured on the theater’s walls a running list of the names of the dead, along with the mounting death toll, subtotaled by state.

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Actors on stage at Theater Four in New York circa 1969.Credit...Photo by Martha Swope / the New York Public Library

The action largely tracks Kramer’s furious battle to get the government, the medical establishment and gay men themselves to pay attention to the disaster that was just beginning to engulf them. But Kramer was also battling the gay theatrical tradition, which he saw, even before AIDS, as petty, artificial and insufficiently political. (He criticized “The Boys in the Band” for its “internalized homophobia.”) “The Normal Heart” is a fierce corrective to those perceived faults, but it’s not merely the rant some people remember. The story of Ned’s public efforts is mirrored in his private effort to save his lover, Felix, a closeted New York Times writer dying of AIDS. The play ends with their “marriage” at Felix’s deathbed — a marriage in quotes because it wouldn’t have been legal in New York for another quarter century.

“The Normal Heart” is canonical not just for its anger and prescience, though these should be enough to canonize Kramer. The play saved lives, scaring its audiences into reality in a way that the vague public-health information of the time utterly failed to do. It also reframed the way we would forever look at gay men and gay theater. That did not mean abjuring love as a subject, but rather ennobling it while understanding its limitations. Hence the title, taken from a passage in Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” about the “error bred in the bone / Of each woman and each man.” That error is much deadlier than mere disease. It is the impossible craving of the “normal heart”: “Not universal love / But to be loved alone.”

Auden, a poet, shows these drives as divergent; Kramer, a dramatist, looks at how they converge. For him as for most playwrights, the conjoint themes of society and self — twined in an embrace that is intimate yet suffocating — are the basis of all great theater. Without the “self” part, a play is rarely engaging. Without the “society” part, it is (no matter how engaging) inconsequential.

That’s why my canon starts when it does. For gay playwrights writing before 1960, the link between self and society was severed by homophobia: The self could not engage openly with society, or not, at least, in front of society. Which doesn’t mean there were no great plays with gay characters by gay playwrights: Look again at “The Glass Menagerie.” Tom — as the performances by Quinto and Mantello in the two most recent Broadway revivals make plain — can only be understood as a furtive homosexual. But Tom’s crypto-proto-gayness doesn’t make “The Glass Menagerie” a gay play; it’s merely a great one.

Turns out those celebrities slumming at “The Boys in the Band” mattered. Just as white bons vivants had been cultivating (some might say appropriating) black Harlem for generations, the straights and A-listers heading to Theater Four in their limos helped carry the news, like a virus, back with them. I don’t mean to be snarky; this was not always a cultural safari, a hunt for the most exotic new trophies. Some came to learn, to be changed. And yet one of the things “The Boys in the Band” (and the other plays I’m writing about) did was to show nongay audiences just how gay their lives already were. Their suffering, their hubris, their senses of humor were more familiar than not. Who, after all, had been doing their hair?

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Read T a Poem | Robin de Jesús

The actor reads "Translation" by Julian Randall.

My mother hangs up the phone scrapes loose the tears prepares to tell me who is dying this time I speak no Spanish my mother is the translator of the dying my family is always the dying I say family despite the fact I have attended none of their funerals My abuelita was a ricocheting ghost she died once and I forgot an entire language OK I didn’t forget It just became inconvenient to remember who wants a language for the living anyway? An inventory of my tongue yields nothing that looks like my mother the resemblance stops at the mouth She is fluent in a language I am only ever ugly in she falls asleep in front of the tv her show muted I wonder if in her dreams I can speak

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The actor reads "Translation" by Julian Randall.

So the efficacy of the canonical gay plays did not depend, or depend only, on gay audiences. Countless gay men couldn’t stand these works anyway. If they weren’t too angry, they were too passive; if not too camp, too mirthless. Like other marginalized groups — Jews of an earlier generation who objected to the tenement soap operas of Clifford Odets; blacks who found Uncle Tomism in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” — many gays saw betrayal in honest, let alone exaggerated, portraits. Yet who wants a banal portrait?

Which naturally brings us to Fierstein, whose play “Torch Song Trilogy” succeeded by forcing exaggeration and banality to share a bed. His hero, Arnold Beckoff, is a drag performer, lip-syncing fabulousness by night but dreaming of, and eventually achieving, ordinary life pleasures by day. It’s quite a journey, not least because it echoes that of many gay men over the last 50 years. In the first play, “The International Stud,” we watch Arnold bend over, brightly chattering, as a stranger penetrates him. In the farcical second play, “Fugue in a Nursery,” he observes and experiments with coupledom. By the third play, “Widows and Children First,” he lives in a simulacrum of a straight sitcom: He is a single father raising a son while managing an ex. The crux of the drama is that old standby, a fight (albeit a thrilling one) with his mother.

All of this takes place, and was produced on Broadway as a single four-hour work, just as AIDS was dawning. The play’s dramatic trajectory suggests the path that gayness — and gay theater — might have taken without the plague. Yet the plague did not, as you might expect, drastically attenuate the story’s effectiveness and charm. Last fall’s Off Broadway revival, starring Michael Urie as Arnold and Mercedes Ruehl as his mother, played like gangbusters. (Fierstein did trim it by about an hour.) Notably, it was the more outré material from the first and second parts that seemed to have aged. The more conventional mother-son fight in the third was as riveting as ever.

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From left: Carver. Actor BRIAN HUTCHINSON in an Officine Générale sweater, $270, and Levi’s jeans. Actor JIM PARSONS in a Jil Sander coat, $2,540, (212) 838-6100, Tod’s T-shirt, $225, tods.com, and Levi’s jeans. Director JOE MANTELLO in his own sweater, shirt and glasses.Credit...Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh. Styled by Jay Massacret

THAT’S A CURIOUS thing. Coming out and defending one’s life is supposed to be old news for white urban gays like Arnold. Gay parenting, too, is no longer shocking; there are television comedies about it (and, speaking for myself, the comedy of actually being a gay parent). For that matter, the themes of the other plays on my list are not exactly futuristic. In some ways they even seem backward.

But their stories are somehow evergreen, as the 2011 Broadway revival of “The Normal Heart” and the 2014 HBO film made clear. (The stage version starred Mantello and the film was directed by Murphy; the two are clearly the doyens of the gay canonic renaissance.) It’s not just that these productions happened, though it’s part of the deal for a canonical play to be reproducible. The 2017 revival of “Torch Song” (as its title is now rendered) is transferring to Broadway in the fall. “Jeffrey,” too, may be theater hunting; a recent reading starring Urie and Russell Tovey was in part an experiment to see how it lands today.

The deeper reason this material holds up despite being so tied to its times is that gayness, even now, does not operate as other minority identities do. Gay people are not usually raised in gay families, the way Jews are raised in Jewish ones, and blacks in black ones; gays have to invent their identity from scratch in every generation. And even if there were a healthy tradition of mentorship by gay elders, the population of gay elders — the ones who would now be in their 60s and 70s — was decimated by AIDS. So whatever advances have been made in supportive parenting, the process by which a gay man finds himself and his people is much the same as it ever was: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Or to put it more gaily, you are what we were.

For Murphy, such intellectual workarounds are unnecessary; he finds “The Boys in the Band” forward-thinking whether or not you consider that it was written in a time when “you could literally be arrested” for being gay. “Everything discussed in it” — hatred, self-hatred, debates about monogamy — “is happening now,” he says. Nor has gay style gone out of style. “I defy you to tell me the difference between ‘Oh, Mary, don’t ask,’ and ‘Yaaas Kween,’ ” Mantello says. “And to pretend that shame does not exist because of all the strides of the past years just seems unrealistic.”

The persistence of gay shame, an element of all these plays, is certainly troubling, yet I wonder if what we’re seeing today is really the same thing. Maybe gay shame is itself being appropriated, or merging with the common human shame that writers have been anatomizing since Adam and Eve. That would explain why the canonical gay plays have always spoken to nongay audiences, and why today, when other forms of marginalization are so pressing, they speak more urgently, not less. Is gay history so far past that it now passes for everyone’s?

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A 1970 promotional image for the film.Credit...National General / Photofest

Too soon to tell. It’s hardly been more than a decade, Murphy says, since he got notes nixing gay characters on his TV shows. “Are we really so much better off than we were 50 years ago?”

If not, it may be time for a new canon. The one I’ve sketched ended in 1993. Yours may include such fine gay plays as “Bent,” “The Laramie Project,” “As Is,” “Fifth of July,” “The Dying Gaul,” “Take Me Out,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and the musical “Falsettos.” Or you might include works by and about women, from “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove” by Jane Chambers to the musical “Fun Home” by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, to Paula Vogel’s “Indecent.” What gives me pause when I look at my own list of gay male playwrights is not their gender or generation; it’s that all of them are white, and all but Crowley Jewish. It’s perhaps too easy to say that these are the demographics that had access to the microphone, and that revisiting this in a few years will produce different results, as others succeed in scratching out the opportunities that gave Kushner and Kramer their platforms.

But great plays arise from something even great playwrights cannot control: great catastrophes. They may be political, social, medical or even personal — though if personal then personal in a way that anticipates the zeitgeist. White gay men of the type who write popular plays have few specifically gay disasters left to mine; a windfall, no doubt, for their well-being but not for the theater. Luckinbill, reflecting on “The Boys in the Band,” has said that the “great truth” of the play is that “gay people are ordinary.” But that insight can only be mind-blowing once.

The gay plays I’ve been seeing more recently are variously charming, sexy, provocative and beautifully crafted. Sometimes, as in the 2015 comedies “Steve” by Mark Gerrard and “Dada Woof Papa Hot” by Peter Parnell, they deal with timely subjects — parenting, aging — that, for me anyway, hit close to home. But issues like these are a bit baggy for great drama, and plays that question the homonormative movement (like Drew Droege’s hilarious 2016 anti-marriage screed “Bright Colors and Bold Patterns”) seem destined for a short shelf life. Even Crowley’s 2002 sequel to “Boys in the Band,” almost inevitably titled “The Men From the Boys,” washes up on the rocks of maturity. Three of the “boys” are in A.A. now.

The palette of these works is grayer, more tasteful. Sometimes, to judge from what’s onstage, I have to conclude that Crate & Barrel is sponsoring the new gay agenda. And whether such plays even qualify as gay depends on your definition of “gay plays.” (An old theater joke says they are plays that have sex with other plays.) Presumably a gay play is defined in part by its focus on gay characters and gay life, but it is more than that, too. A gay play has a gay voice — one that may now be disappearing along with its literal cognate: the lisping, purse-lipped, tooth-sucking caricature bequeathed to us by the likes of Liberace and Paul Lynde. A play’s gay voice, though, is more than just inflection; it’s fundamental. It’s quick-witted, protean, emotional. In the way only formerly suppressed things can be, it insists on largeness. The largeness may be conceptual or political or literal; “Angels” weighs in somewhere between seven and eight hours. Great gay plays are large because the fight they dramatize is about more than diapers, weddings or credenzas. In “Angels” and “The Normal Heart,” the characters are fighting for their lives. In “Jeffrey,” terror is the enemy. “Torch Song” and “The Boys in the Band” wage a war for dignity. Goulash or lasagna, these are five-course meals.

Can it be that “Angels” — the play that proclaims “The great work begins!” — is actually the end of the line? After 25 years without a similarly thundering new entry into the canon, it may be time to recognize that the spotlight is moving on. As if turning Kauffmann’s 1966 essay on its head, many of the best young gay male playwrights — Stephen Karam, Jordan Harrison, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — no longer write about gay people anyway, or write about them only peripherally. Adam Bock’s “A Life,” produced Off Broadway in 2016, is a terrific, terrifying fantasia on the afterlife whose main character merely happens to be gay.

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On the Cover | The cast of “The Boys in the Band” is featured in T’s March 4 Men’s Style issue.

From left: Quinto in a Giorgio Armani sweater, $825, armani.com, Scotch & Soda jeans, $165, scotch-soda.com, and Adidas Originals sneakers, $75, adidas.com. Bomer in a Burberry T-shirt, $125, us.burberry.com, A.P.C. jeans, $220, apc.fr, and vintage boots. Rannells in a Mr P. T-shirt, $75, mrporter.com, Frame jeans, $199, frame-store.com, and New Balance sneakers, $80, similar styles available at newbalance.com. Parsons in a Ralph Lauren turtleneck, $1,095, ralphlauren.com, and Levi’s jeans, $70, levi.com.
Credit...Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh. Styled by Jay Massacret

That’s fine; it means that playwrights representing other backgrounds and other letters in the LGBTQ coalition may get a shot at the culture’s widest attention. When Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Choir Boy” opens in 2019 at Manhattan Theatre Club, it will likely be the first black gay male play ever seen on Broadway. And Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance” starts performances in London this month. It is a homage, at least in size and two-part structure, to “Angels” but also to E.M. Forster’s “Howards End.” If “The Inheritance” hews to the Forsterian theme of nostalgia for a purposeful past, as its title suggests it may, it would be a very apt gay play for this particular moment.

But among new works I’ve actually seen, the only gay — or, rather, queer — theater piece that rises to the level of those I’ve beatified is Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” which premiered as a complete work at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2016. And I’ve only seen part of it; the dragtastic marathon nightclub act is 24 hours long. (I listened to the rest.) Miraculously, it combines Kushner’s vision, Kramer’s anger, Crowley’s cattiness, Fierstein’s warmth and Rudnick’s wit (plus a whole lot else) into one subversive astonishment, forcibly making room in American history for all of those previously omitted. Its entire structure — the repurposing of popular songs from “Yankee Doodle Dandy” to “Born to Run” so they tell suppressed stories — suggests the idea that canons are meant to be hijacked.

On the other hand, Rudnick isn’t finished with the old canon yet. He’s working on an unabashedly gay play called “Big Night,” inspired by the 2016 murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It’s a comedy.


Hair by Jimmy Paul at Susan Price NYC. Hair assistants: Evanie Frausto, Felicia Burrows, Levi Monarch. Grooming by Sil Bruinsma at Streeters using Éminence Organic Skin Care. Makeup assistant: Grace Rose. Tailors: Grace Ryung Kim, Curie Choi. Stylist’s assistants: Sean Nguyen, Olivia Kozlowski, Lucy Gaston

Lighting director: Jodokus Driessen. Digital technician: Brian Anderson

Jesse Green is the chief theater critic. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was the theater critic for New York magazine and a contributing editor. He is the author of a novel, “O Beautiful,” and a memoir, “The Velveteen Father.” More about Jesse Green

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 74 of T Magazine with the headline: A Brief History of Gay Theater, in Three Acts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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