Category Archives: Politics & Current Affairs

Avoid Bullies During (and After) the Holidays

[Originally published in November 2016.]

As the holidays approach, I’m reminded of multiple painful Thanksgiving dinners years ago during which I felt forced to spend time with a relative who repeatedly bullied me. She insulted me in my own house, picked fights with me in front of others and blamed me for actions I hadn’t taken, and for words I never said. Ultimately, I refused to be treated that way anymore, and stopped spending holidays with someone who insisted on telling lies about me and attacking me for things I didn’t do. Having to refuse to see her at holidays was very painful, but spending time with someone who claimed to love me yet also berated, insulted and lied to me and about me was worse.

If you find yourself in a situation in which you are dreading holidays because you fear that you will be insulted or attacked, or worry that you will feel trapped and helpless, remember: there is no rule that says you must be with other people at holiday time. We have all been told that spending a holiday alone is terrifying and awful, and that holiday solitude means we are bad or worthless, unloved or unloving. None of that is true.

If you dread the holidays because you fear you have no alternative but to walk into the lion’s den and be eaten, know that it is perfectly okay to stay home (or go away someplace) and celebrate the day in your own way. You can be thankful and be a good person even if you eat a bowl of soup by yourself or with only your partner or immediate family, then take yourself out to a movie. You can sleep in and catch up on your novel, or binge watch your favorite TV show, or listen to podcasts while you do puzzles, or take a long walk with your favorite dog. You can eat spaghetti instead of turkey. You always have options.

The biggest concern about opting out of powerfully painful social interactions is often about how others will view you afterwards: will they shun you, punish you, talk about you behind your back if you don’t attend? They might. Your refusing to attend an event could cause a family rift. Not attending Thanksgiving with your in-laws or sister or dad might mean getting angry phone calls about it later, so there is a trade-off and a risk of future pain. But if you are miserable being with other people because they treat you with contempt or disregard, is that a healthy dynamic to perpetuate? If they (or you) become abusive when provoked, especially in the current political climate when so many of us are fragile, thin-skinned and worried about the future, engaging with others in anger after one too many glasses of holiday wine could be not only emotionally but physically unsafe.

If being with a person, even one whom you love, makes you feel sick, sad, worthless, angry or frustrated and efforts to interact in a healthier way haven’t worked, clinging to that relationship even though it brings out the worst in you and others can be very damaging. Being unwilling to accept another’s bad behavior just because it comes from a family member does not make you monstrous. Avoiding abusive situations is just good self care.

Depression is often exacerbated over the holidays when we compare what we think we need to feel fulfilled with what seems to be available to us. We may be reminded of past hurts, losses, shame and regrets, and they may overwhelm our feelings of love, happiness or safety. If you fear that being with certain people is not safe for you and will bring on destructive feelings toward yourself (or them), remember: you don’t have to engage. You don’t have to attend events. You can have a quiet holiday on your own without falling apart. Others may respond with hurt feelings, and you may have to deal with your own feelings of guilt (often not deserved) if you prioritize your own mental health above placating those who cause you distress. But if you’re an adult, you do have a choice about where you spend your time and with whom. Please don’t put yourself or others in harm’s way.

British Beauty Tips Circa 1960

In 1908, Pathé invented the newsreel, a short-subject film  shown in cinemas prior to feature films. The Pathé Brothers of France owned the world’s largest film equipment and production company, and they saw the benefit of bringing news to life for moving picture fans and thus padding out an afternoon or evening’s cinematic entertainment. In the years before television, people grew to rely on newsreels during their weekly cinema visits to keep up with royal visits, war news, sports, fashion and celebrity events and travelogues that took them to far-away places.

Over time, many short subject films took on a nationalistic bent, and they were used as propaganda tools during World Wars I and II. Some showed women on the home front how to make do with rationed food and fabrics during and after World War II. Others showed teens at play, making them seem like laughable aliens, underscoring the generation gap that caused such rifts between teens and their parents in the 1950s and 1960s and played out in major culture clashes in both cinematic and real life.

News reels often depicted the people of other nations as quaint and exotic, and made women look like vain, silly, laughable lightweights. But they were wittily narrated, well-edited and often visually sumptuous, so they make for fascinating views into 20th century cultural history today.

Pathé short-subject films reached the height of their appeal in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s in Britain. Many of these shorts involve women being made to look foolish while demonstrating outlandish fashion or beauty trends and inventions, all accompanied by an orchestra playing a peppy tune and a wry male narrator making snappy sexist comments.

It’s always interesting to see how much effort has been put into inventing odd machinery to distract women, perpetuate stereotypes and keep women “in their place.” It still goes on today, of course, but now women’s voices are used to make the narrated hype more palatable and to seem more “empowering” and less demeaning.

Hatred of “The Other”—Our New Plague

Ireland’s Great Potato Famine
[Originally published in July 2018]
During Ireland’s Great Potato Famine of 1845-52, one out of every eight people in Ireland died of starvation or disease. The famine resulted in more than a million deaths. Because potatoes were the nation’s staple food, untold numbers were reduced to eating grass or nothing at all when every year’s potato crops failed. Those who ate the rotted potatoes pulled from the ground became ill. And yet, British landlords made peasant farmers gather their wheat crops and send them to Britain while the Irish became walking skeletons, or ceased to walk at all.

Many who could gather together enough money to leave came to America, resulting in nearly a million poor Irish immigrants arriving on American shores during the famine years alone. These huge masses of desperate, often uneducated Irish made up the first large migration of poverty-stricken people to the U.S. This caused an upswelling of nativist hatred, bigotry and violence toward the Irish that took decades to abate.

Back in Ireland, British landlords evicted the starving Irish farmers and sharecroppers from their modest huts and houses when they couldn’t supply the promised number of bushels of produce from blighted land. Landlords kicked starving children, disabled elderly people and everyone in between out of their homes. They took every grain away from dying Irish babies and threw families out into the harsh elements, where hundreds of thousands of children died.
 
Why? Because rich landowners convinced themselves that vulnerable people were worthless people, that affluence is next to godliness, that some people are just born dirty and disgusting and disposable.
 
We have recently seen men kidnap tiny victims of war, call their parents murderers and rapists, and send them back to the countries that killed their family members and threatened their lives. Powerful Americans prey on victims of war, legal asylum seekers. Poor, battered, sick and exhausted people offer themselves up to our mercy, thinking the great and powerful United States will keep them from dying. They think we will shelter them from the gangs that torture and murder their loved ones in their home countries. They hope to get jobs and work hard and have a chance to be safe and stop their nightmares. Because they thought we meant it when we said that our nation reveres liberty and justice for all.
 
Treating the Irish like nonentities was made easier by the prevalence of stereotypes of the Irish people as stupid, lazy, filthy, obscene, drunken, vulgar and subhuman. They were said not to care about their children the way good Christian English people did, not to mind eating rot, to be too drunk to be aware of their misery, to be innately drawn to sin. Many English (and Americans) were taught that the Irish had earned their state because they were depraved and unloved by God. Their Catholicism was considered vulgar, and was held up as one more reason to despise them. This anti-Irish sentiment followed the Irish to America, so even though many found opportunity here, acceptance was hard-won.
 
Now we hear so many of those same epithets and slanderous words flung at Mexicans and Central Americans and South Americans who are struggling just to stay alive. The Irish immigrants who flocked to American in the 1840s and 1850s would certainly recognize the degrading and dehumanizing words that spill out of our president’s mouth, and the rough and degrading treatment given to those who drag themselves here asking only to be given a chance to stay alive. 
 
This is how evil spreads—by determining that those who suffer must deserve their suffering, and that those in hard circumstances don’t feel or care or love as much as the affluent do. By turning away from our responsibility to help the most vulnerable among us, we stomp out compassion. By labeling the destitute and distraught as vermin, as innately criminal, as dirty, dangerous and bad for society, we propagate the rot.
 
We are spreading a new plague. We are setting our own destruction in motion.
 
Many currently in power preach that the poor are bad and undeserving, and that the foreign-born poor are even more depraved—dangerous, too. This is one of the roots of evil—this determination of the worth of human beings based on homelands or ethnicity.
 
For a few decades, we seemed to have gotten better about this. Most in the U.S. who still held filthy, bigoted thoughts (and there were many) knew to hide them in public. But the demons of prejudice and hate walk more openly among us now. They continue to spread the lies that some people are innately unworthy of concern, of help, even of life.
 
Why don’t we learn?

Laughing with Dr. King

MLK laughs
MLK laughing with Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr., Coretta Scott King and others.

We often see photos of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., looking serious, dignified, even dour. But he was a man who loved to laugh and who had great joy in his heart. His short, determined life involved constantly facing down injustice and living with fear and struggle, sure—but he loved laughter and fun, good food and good music as much as anyone. He was a real, flesh and blood human being, not a stoic saint immune to the pain and difficulty around him. And I think that makes his devotion, determination and persistence all the more extraordinary, don’t you?

Happy MLK Day, everyone.

Let Them Eat French Fries

Yes, it’s true: Trump’s failure to plan ahead and provide hot food for the visiting Clemson Tigers last night is just a distraction. The fact that he had piles of stale, cooling food sitting on the table and as the White House butler lit candelabra around them is as nothing to the horrid things he does each day. The ridiculousness of having staff portion French fries out in tiny water cups with the Presidential seal on them is laughable, but not earth-shattering. The fact that this billionaire was so cheap that he wouldn’t even spring for a hot catered dinner, but made a proud point of serving his guests of honor cold fast food shouldn’t surprise us—it’s totally in keeping with his usual ways.

But we should note his total inability to tell the truth even in the most mundane and verifiable circumstances. To be so incredibly petty as to lie even about the number of hamburgers served, to feel the need for self-aggrandizement and lies in even the tiniest particulars, to say that “over a thousand” burgers were served when he only bought 300—if he did pay any of his own money at all—this is a constantly changing virtual reality that he manipulates in order to destabilize the world. We should never assume that he will be honest or do the right thing in any particulars, ever. We should assume that he will pull the whole world down to make a point if we let him.

Will we let him?

Allies Behind the Scenes: Early 20th Century Support for Gay Rights

Radclyffe Hall (right) and her lover Una Vincenzo with their dachshunds at the 1923 Crufts dog show. Photo: Harry Ransom Center

In 1928, British lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness was published. It scandalized official British society, was decried as “a danger to the nation” and was eventually suppressed and censored for being a work of “obscene libel”—not because there was any actual description of lesbian sexual behaviors beyond a kiss and the most oblique mention of sharing a bed. Simply admitting that lesbianism existed was considered a scandalous act, and allowing a lesbian to share her thoughts on what it was like to experience romantic feelings for another woman caused official fear and outrage.

Happily, we now know that Radclyffe Hall received thousands of letters of support from people around the world, gay and straight, following the official ban placed on British publication of her work. That she kept those letters shows how deeply they moved her.
In every cultural moment there have always been those who supported inclusivity and acceptance. When they speak up and announce who they are to the world, or when they prove themselves to be allies, they give comfort and strength to those on the front lines of social change. Even if we don’t feel strong enough to be leaders or to profess our beliefs in public, we do a great service by giving support and encouragement behind the lines. Every good action moves the cause of justice forward.

Why Do People Hate Vegans?

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I’m always surprised when a meat eater shows me disrespect and derision when seeing that I choose not to eat meat. I frequently hear the trope that vegans and vegetarians are inherently self-absorbed and annoying to be around. Those who enjoy meat often write that vegans are preachy or difficult. But you know what? In 30 years as a lacto-ovo (dairy- and egg-eating) vegetarian, I’ve never come across that in person.
 
Yes, I’ve politely asked waiters to accommodate my needs. I’ve asked about alternatives to meaty preparations of dishes, and been disappointed when every vegetable dish, soup and salad on a large menu is prepared with meat or meat byproducts. But I have not glared at my tablemates, lectured people on their dietary choices or berated chefs. It is not rude or unreasonable for me (or a Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Seventh Day Adventist, keto-diet-follower, gluten-free diner, diabetic, GERD sufferer or anyone else) to ask politely for food that meets our particular needs.
 
I occasionally meet (and often read about) omnivores who see those of us with different culinary needs as being troublesome, inconvenient or even, somehow, threatening. Some have confided in me that they secretly feel squeamish when thinking about having animals killed for their meals, so they resent vegetarians for merely existing. They’re uncomfortable around people who avoid meat since our presence reminds them that the pink packages they purchase from the meat counter were once parts of living beings. Our existence proves that meat isn’t essential to health or happiness, and some sadly find that threatening to their comfort and traditions.
 
Shortly after I established Apple’s Vegetarian Club, I got a threatening anonymous message via intracompany mail. Why? Because I was so bold as to offer recipes and nutritional info and invite people to join me for lunch to discuss health and animal welfare. I didn’t publish polemics or accost people with speeches; I simply made information and encouragement available in a conference room once a month.
 
Over the five years during which I published Style With Substance, a newsletter of cruelty-free product news, I occasionally received hate mail telling me that I was going against God and nature by offering alternatives to cosmetics and household products that maimed and killed animals unnecessarily. Haters wrote that vegetarianism and a search to avoid animal cruelty were proof of my satanic and anti-Christian nature. But did I ever attack people for using makeup tested on rabbits or wearing leather jackets? Not once. I only offered alternatives to those who cared to find out about them. Did my newsletter include screeds or attacks on those with different views? Never. Indeed, I cautioned readers who wanted to contact companies to urge them to stop testing on animals to always be polite and respectful. But some people truly detest those of us who suggest that alternatives to the norm are possible and even beneficial.
 
My mother took my vegetarianism as an affront to her, though I never once put her down for eating meat or said that my choices made me superior. When she ate meat at the same table, I did not glare at or shame her. She chose to interpret my desire to live my life differently as equivalent to a slap in her face and a personal rejection of her. She decided it meant that I thought myself too good for her and her way of life—something I never said nor believed.
 
I’ve read that vegans can be pedantic and overly assertive and confrontational; in my 30 years as a vegetarian, I’ve never witnessed that happen in person. Not once. Do they exist? Sure; I’ve seen articles in which cranky vegans were quoted. I’ve been disgusted by the destructive, ugly, illegal antics of PETA and the Animal Liberation Front and other extremists who have sparked backlashes against gentler supporters of animal welfare. I’ve seen photos of confrontational vegans. But I have not met those people. I’ve met literally hundreds of vegans at vegetarian clubs, festivals and special events over the course of three decades, and made many more vegetarian and vegan friends in the course of a life lived in liberal communities near San Francisco, Seattle and Boston. If nasty vegans were truly so common, don’t you think I might have run across one?
 
I’ve also read and heard people whine that I must hate good food because I don’t eat meat or fish, but my vegetarian daughter and I are foodies who truly love fine dining, sophisticated preparations and presentations of beautifully prepared foods from all over the world. The mischaracterizations of those of us who simply, quietly don’t want to consume animals are common, and mystifying.
 
So why did and do people like Anthony Bourdain and Julia Child and Gordon Ramsay detest vegetarians so? Why do they judge our tastes and choices so harshly, assume that we are rude, tasteless, boorish or unsophisticated? Bourdain wrote, “Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.” He described vegans as vegetarians’ “Hezbollah-like splinter faction.” He went on to say that vegetarians are a “persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn” and that “They make for bad travelers and bad guests. … [If] you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. … Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.”
 
Julia Child said of vegetarians, “Personally, I don’t think pure vegetarianism is a healthy lifestyle. It’s more fear of food—that whole thing that red meat is bad for you. And then there are people who don’t eat meat because it’s against their morals. Well, there’s nothing you can do with people like that. I’ve often wondered to myself: Does a vegetarian look forward to dinner, ever?”
 
Gordon Ramsay, who recently said that he’s following a vegetarian diet himself, used to find it hilarious to hide meat in food prepared for vegetarians who made it clear that they do not wish to eat meat. He delighted in subverting the deeply held beliefs of people who find meat eating problematic for ethical or health or other reasons—something equivalent to sneaking bacon into an Orthodox Jew’s or an observant Muslim’s lunch, or forcing a Hindu to eat steak tartare, or refusing an allergic diner’s request that you leave out an ingredient out of sheer petty spite. It’s not just contemptible—it’s immoral.
 
The truly rude, inhospitable, judgmental and threatening people in this world tend not to be those concerned about eating animals. Those who tease me and tell me I’m oversensitive, stupid, rude or unsophisticated aren’t vegans. I don’t want to tease or attack meat-eaters; I don’t find derision, contempt or lack of respect for strongly held ethical beliefs amusing or acceptable for anyone. So please, before you tease another vegetarian, joke about hiding bacon in their food or roll your eyes if they ask whether there’s chicken stock in something, think again about how you’d feel to be mocked, chided and derided for living according to your private principles. Live and let live.
[Illustration: A Feast for the Eyes, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1590]

Hamilton: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Miracle

It’s true: Hamilton totally earns the hype. My sweetheart treated me to a touring company performance of the musical here in Boston last night, and it was the first time either of us had seen it. What a tour de force!

It’s a constantly moving, singing, dancing, quite literally spinning masterpiece of intricate physical, vocal and emotional involvement among cast, crew, musicians, choreographers, set designers and visionaries. Everything is held aloft by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant rhythm, rhyme, and lyrical passion and inspired by Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow’s erudition.

It starts with a pow and never slows down, and turntables within turntables spin against each other to allow for even more movement and multiple simultaneous stories to play out before your eyes.

There is very little spoken dialog separating the musical numbers—it’s a constantly flowing, beautifully paced river of rhythm, full of emotion yet always supported by a framework of fact, a propulsive political urgency and this historical imperative: Make this moment count. Make your vision real. Fight for what matters. Keep on trying. You can rest another day—acknowledge your power to make a difference right now and turn that potential power into positive action. It’s honest, with no holds barred: thrilling, merciful, inspiring.

Families Belong Together—Help Them to Reunite

Yesterday Boston was 90 degrees and the air was thick with humidity. This crowd-hating introvert was deeply sleep-deprived and had a long list of chores to accomplish. I dreaded the idea of  rallying and marching in that heat with a bunch of strangers for hours. But none of that mattered as much as the fact that my federal government is kidnapping children and torturing families, and I had a chance to register outrage and encourage others to notice and react to the evil being done in our names.

Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions are waging war on vulnerable families who have lost everything. These families have dragged themselves to our doors begging for asylum, the most urgent and elemental assistance that a noncitizen can ask for. The U.S. is using terrorist tactics against children to destroy families who have marched through Hell, and is doing it as a political ploy. This is so shocking, so evil, so much like the Hitlerian tactics of World War II that I am left dumbstruck and sick to know that monsters are terrorizing babies in my name.

The people who come to our borders asking for asylum have lost friends and family members to gangs or war at home. They’ve given up their whole lives and made their dangerous, difficult ways across hundreds, even thousands of miles to pull themselves to our border crossings. All they ask is to keep themselves and their children from being murdered in their home countries. They seek refuge from violence and terror, and a chance to live and work and contribute to a society that doesn’t treat them like insects to be maligned, crushed and destroyed. Their children have already seen and experienced terrors I cannot even imagine; they are fragile, vulnerable, sick and exhausted.

And now Trump and Sessions are quite literally ripping nursing babies from mothers’ breasts, telling parents their babies are being taken away to be bathed (which is just what Nazis told Jews as they were about to be lethally gassed in concentration camps) and then sending the most vulnerable people in the world far away to live with strangers—all while failing to keep track of the locations of the parents or their children.

My government is caging children like animals, giving some of them sheets of Mylar instead of soft blankets and instructing them to lie on floors instead of beds, the cries of other children ringing in their ears as they try to sleep in their cages surrounded by strangers.

Those guarding the children are told not to hug them. At least one recording was made and played on MSNBC of a woman warning children in Spanish not to talk to those who visit the camps (including reporters) about what happened to them, implying that they  might not be reunited if the children speak the truth to reporters or doctors.

Children have been seen changing babies’ diapers at detention centers. Reports say that some children are being drugged.  Central and South American refugees and migrants are raped at very high rates, so chances are great that some of these children were assaulted or knew of (or witnessed) their mothers’ assaults during their escape from their home countries. Stories circulate of children being abused and assaulted at detention centers. Imagine the horror of being stripped naked, washed and examined by strangers after being taken from your family. Think of the terror of knowing that your parents cannot protect you after you’ve seen what happens to vulnerable people. And think of how many kids are being denied necessary medical care because their medical histories are unknown.

This is kidnapping. This is torture. And Trump and Sessions are engaging in this terrorism in our name.

Those who don’t care about the lives of these children and their families should turn their selfish, contemptuous, compassion-free hearts to this thought: Trump and Sessions are breeding hatred against the U.S. in the hearts of millions around the world. They are stoking a desire for vengeance against the U.S. in the minds of many who have been ripped apart from their families, and millions more who are watching this debacle from other countries.

This state-sponsored terrorism will have dangerous reverberations against America for decades to come. It will leave permanent wounds in the hearts and minds of thousands of family members personally affected by these actions, and will turn millions more witnesses to these atrocities against us. Our leaders are sowing the seeds of future terrorist acts against the U.S. by these actions. Terrorism breeds terrorism.

So yes, I managed to get up off the sofa and take half a day away from my privileged life to send lawmakers a message of support for basic human decency when children’s lives are at stake. I left my comfortable apartment to walk with friendly strangers who believe in what America officially stood for not long ago: appreciation for the strength, work ethic and inventiveness of immigrants; a better life for the descendants of enslaved and oppressed people; appreciation and sorrow for the losses Native North and South American people suffered at the hands of white conquerors; revulsion at the thought of racism, terrorism and xenophobia; and compassion for children of all colors and origins.

This last point is so basic to people of all cultures that I can’t believe it even has to be expressed. A just, good nation does not rip children away from loving, caring parents in order to torture families into giving up their only hope of staying alive after fleeing danger at home. Compassionate lovers of liberty do not defy their own established asylum laws to suddenly turn on the people we have for so many years encouraged to come to us for help.

Good people do not choose to harm children. 

If you can attend a Families Belong Together march, rally or other event and be counted among those who oppose the use of federal forces to kidnap and torture children and their parents, I encourage you to do so. If that’s too difficult, phone calls or emails to your members of Congress are very important and can be accomplished in under three minutes. Donations to organizations like RAICES, the ACLU and MoveOn who are working to reunite kidnapped children with their parents are wonderful, too—even $5 helps.

Speak to your family members and friends. Let your voice be heard. You have more power than you realize to do good and make a change—so please use it to help vulnerable children avoid a lifetime of pain, fear and resentment toward an America that let this happen and has not done enough to try to limit the damage.

Friends, please stand with me against U.S. government-sponsored terrorism of children and refugee families.

Bless you. May your family be safe, intact, well and free.

The Boys in the Band

 

Boys in the Band

[In honor of the Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s 50-year-old play The Boys in the Band starring Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells, I’m reposting this piece I wrote in 2009.]

Some years ago, while watching TV in the wee hours of the morning, I happened upon a film that I’d never before heard of. I was instantly hooked. It turned out to be a milestone in gay-themed filmmaking, a cult classic that alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) delighted and appalled New York theatrical audiences in 1968 and then moved to the screen in 1970. That film was The Boys in the Band.

Written by gay playwright Mart Crowley, the play attracted celebrities and the New York in-crowd nearly instantly after it opened at a small off-Broadway theater workshop in 1968. The cast of nine male characters worked together so successfully that the whole bunch of them made the transition to the screen in 1970, which is nearly unheard of.

Crowley had been a well-connected and respected but poor young writer when his play became a smash in 1968. While still a young man, he knew how the Hollywood game was played and how to jockey his success into control over the casting of the film. Working with producer Dominick Dunne he adapted his script into a screenplay and watched director William Friedkin, who also directed The French Connection and The Exorcist, lovingly keep the integrity of the play while opening it up and making it work on the screen.

It’s hard to believe that the play opened off-Broadway a year before the Stonewall riots that set off the modern-day gay rights movement in New York and then swept across the country. The characters in the play, and the whole play itself, are not incidentally gay—the characters’ behavior and the play’s content revolve around their homosexuality. For better or worse, the characters play out, argue over and bat around gay stereotypes: the drama queen, the ultra-effeminate “nelly” fairy, and the dimwitted cowboy hustler (a likely hommage to the cowboy gigolo Joe Buck in the 1965 novel Midnight Cowboy, which was made into a remarkable film by John Schlesinger in 1969). The play also features straight-seeming butch characters who can (and do) “pass” in the outside world, and a visitor to their world who may or may not be homosexual himself.

The action takes place at a birthday party attended only by gay men who let their hair down and camp it up with some very arch and witty dialog during the first third of the film, then the party is crashed by the married former college pal of Michael, the host. A pall settles over the festivities as Michael (played by musical theater star Kenneth Nelson) tries to hide the orientation of himself and his guests. That is, until the party crasher brings the bigotry of the straight world into the room, and Michael realizes he’s doing nobody any favors by keeping up the ruse. During the course of the evening he goes from someone who celebrates the superficial and who has spent all his time and money (and then some) on creating and maintaining a reputation and a public image, to a vindictive bully who lashes out at everyone and forces them all to scrutinize themselves with the same homophobic self-hatred he feels. He appears at first bold and unflinching in his insistence on brutal honesty, but he goes beyond honesty into verbal assault, while we see reserves of inner strength and dignity from characters we had underestimated earlier in the play. Though The Boys in the Band isn’t the masterpiece that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is, I see similarities between the two in the needling, bullying and name-calling that alternates with total vulnerability and unexpected tenderness.

The self-loathing, high-camp hijinks, withering bitchiness and open ogling made many audience members uncomfortable, a number of homosexuals among them. Some felt the story and the characterizations were embarrassingly over-the-top and stereotyped. They thought that having the outside straight world peek in and see these characters up close would only make them disdain homosexuals even more. This is a legitimate criticism; the nasty jibes, pointed attacks, and gay-baiting that goes on among and against gay characters here is the sort of in-fighting that could encourage bigots to become more entrenched in their prejudices when seen out of the context of a full panorama of daily life for these characters.

However, the play and film were also groundbreaking in their depictions of homosexuals as realistic, three-dimensional men with good sides and bad. Even as we watch one character try to eviscerate the others by pointing out stereotypically gay characteristics that make them appear weak and offensive to the straight world at large, there is also a great deal of sympathy and empathy shown among the characters under attack, and even towards the bully at times. Sometimes this tenderness is seen in the characters’ interactions. At other times, it is fostered in the hearts of the audience members by the playwright. Playwright Crowley has us witness people behaving badly, but we recognize over time how fear and society’s hatefulness toward them has brought them to this state.

These characters may try to hold each other up as objects of ridicule, but the strength of the dialog is that we in the audience don’t buy it; with each fresh insult, we see further into the tortured souls of those who do the insulting. We see how, as modern-day sex columnist Dan Savage put it so beautifully in an audio essay on the public radio show This American Life in 2002, it is the “sissies” who are the bravest ones among us, for they are the ones who will not hide who they are, no matter how much scorn, derision and hate they must face as a result of their refusal to back down and play society’s games. Similarly, to use another theatrical example, it is Arnold Epstein, the effeminate new recruit in the Neil Simon 1940’s-era boot-camp play Biloxi Blues, who shows the greatest spine and the strongest backbone in the barracks when he does not hide who he is, and he willingly takes whatever punishment he is given stoically and silently so as not to diminish his honesty and integrity or let down his brothers in arms.

The situation and premise of The Boys in the Band are heightened and the campy drama is elevated for the purposes of building suspense. This echoes the action in plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, where the uglier side of each character is spotlighted and the flattering gauze and filters over the lenses are stripped away dramatically as characters brawl and wail. The emotional breakdowns are overblown and the bitchy catcalling is nearly constant for much of the second half of the film, which becomes tiresome. However, the play addresses major concerns of gay American males of the 1960s head-on: social acceptability, fear of attacks by angry or threatened straight men, how to balance a desire to be a part of a family with a desire to be true to one’s nature, monogamy versus promiscuity, accepting oneself and others even if they act “gayer” or “straighter” than one is comfortable with, etc.

It is startling to remember that, at the time the play was produced, just appearing to be effeminate or spending time in the company of assumed homosexuals was enough to get a person arrested, beaten, jailed or thrown into a mental institution, locked out of his home or job, even lobotomized or given electroshock therapy in hopes of a “cure.” In 1969 the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village by gay people fighting back against police oppression was a rallying cry. It gave homosexuals across the nation the strength to stand up for their rights and refuse to be beaten, threatened, intimidated, arrested or even killed just for being gay. However, anti-gay sentiment in retaliation for homosexuals coming out of the closet and forcing the heterosexual mainstream to acknowledge that there were gay people with inherent civil rights living among them also grew.

Cities like San Francisco, Miami, New York and L.A. became gay meccas that attracted thousands of young men and women, many of whom were more comfortable with their sexuality than the average closeted American homosexual and who wanted to live more openly as the people they really were. There was an air of celebration in heavily gay districts of these cities in the 1970s and early 1980s in the heady years before AIDS. It was a time when a week’s worth of antibiotics could fight off most STDs, and exploring and enjoying the sexual aspects of one’s homosexuality (because being a homosexual isn’t all about sex) didn’t amount to playing Russian Roulette with one’s immune system, as it seemed to be by the early to mid-1980s. Indeed, of the nine men in the cast of the play and the film, five of them (Kenneth Nelson, Leonard Frey, Frederick Combs, Keith Prentice and Robert La Tourneaux) died of AIDS-related causes. This was not uncommon among gay male theatrical professionals who came of age in or before the 1980s. The numbers of brilliant Broadway and Hollywood actors, singers, dancers, directors and choreographers attacked by AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s is staggering.

When the film was made in 1970, all of the actors were warned by agents and others in the industry that they were committing professional suicide by playing openly gay characters, and indeed, several were typecast and did lose work as a result of their courageous choices. Of those nine men in the cast, the one who played the most overtly effeminate, campy queen of all (and who stole the show with his remarkable and endearing performance) was Cliff Gorman. He was a married heterosexual who later won a Tony playing comedian Lenny Bruce in the play “Lenny,” which went on to star Dustin Hoffman in the film version. Gorman was regularly accosted and accused of being a closeted gay man on the streets of New York by both straight and gay people, so believable and memorable was his performance in The Boys in the Band.

The play is very much an ensemble piece; some actors have smaller and more thankless roles with less scenery chewing, but it is clear that it was considered a collaborative effort by the cast and director. The enormous mutual respect and comfort of the characters with each other enriched their performances and made the story resonate more with audiences than it would have otherwise. The actors saw the film and play as defining moments in their lives when they took a stand and came out (whether gay or straight) as being willing to associate themselves with gay issues by performing in such a celebrated (and among some, notorious) work of art. When one of the other actors in the play, Robert La Tourneaux, who played the cowboy gigolo, became ill with AIDS, Cliff Gorman and his wife took La Tourneaux in and looked after him in his last days.

In featurettes about the making of the play and the film on the newly released DVD of the movie,  affection and camaraderie among cast members are evident, as is a great respect for them by director William Friedkin. Those still alive to talk about it regard the show and the ensemble with great love. As Vito Russo noted in The Celluloid Closeta fascinating documentary on gays in Hollywood which is sometimes available for streaming on Netflix, The Boys in the Band offered “the best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form.”

According to Wikipedia, “Critical reaction was, for the most part, cautiously favorable. Variety said it ‘drags’ but thought it had ‘perverse interest.’ Time described it as a ‘humane, moving picture.’ The Los Angeles Times praised it as ‘unquestionably a milestone,’ but ironically refused to run its ads. Among the major critics, Pauline Kael, who disliked Friedkin and panned everything he made, was alone in finding absolutely nothing redeeming about it. She also never hesitated to use the word ‘fag’ in her writings about the film and its characters.”

Wikipedia goes on to say, “Vincent Canby of the New York Times observed, ‘There is something basically unpleasant . . . about a play that seems to have been created in an inspiration of love-hate and that finally does nothing more than exploit its (I assume) sincerely conceived stereotypes.'”

“In a San Francisco Chronicle review of a 1999 revival of the film, Edward Guthmann recalled, ‘By the time Boys was released in 1970 . . . it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism.’ He called it ‘a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it’s aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that’s a good thing.'” Indeed it is.

 

[Originally published in June 2009.]