At a pivotal moment of twentieth century American culture, playwright Mart Crowley adapted his life story to the stage in order to understand the place he and others like him occupied in society. Despite the fact that the story revolves around a collection of gay characters, Crowley insisted he didn’t write The Boys in the Band as a form of activism. Rather, he claims, “I just told the truth.” That truth, as it has been dissected and digested by pop culture over the last fifty years, has certainly changed, but the central themes of the play remain: guilt, anger and resentment, at both self and others, and knowledge that to be on the peripheral of society can be lonely but also inspirational.

Despite The Boys in the Band being neither explicitly activist nor political, it does have an attitude regarding the relationship between gay men who are out and straight men who are wary of how to relate to what they might otherwise regard as non-men. This is explored through the relationship between Michael (Kenneth Nelson), the central character in whose apartment the story takes place, and his college roommate Alan (Peter White), who Michael believes is closeted. Alan is the audience’s entryway into this world of nine gay men, all at varying degrees of comfort with their sexuality, all trying to figure out how to participate in the broader setting of New York City, as told by Crowley and depicted onscreen by William Friedkin.

As friends gather for a birthday party for Harold, the sort of lead ‘queen’ of the group, the relationships between the men are revealed as far more complex and nuanced than most heterosexuals at that point in American theater, let alone homosexuals. Each man is depicted as a different type of gay, from Emory (Cliff Gorman), the most flamboyantly gay and, perhaps surprisingly, the most at ease with his identity, to the couple of Larry (Keith Prentice) and Hank (Laurence Luckinbill), who are capable of ‘passing’ as straight, yet harbor deep unresolved issues around their relationship. The idea that gay men would be as different from one another as they are from straight men is the most vociferous argument in the play. Though they have certain aspects in common with each other, each possesses inner weaknesses and demons that will be confronted, although not all will be resolved.

Given that Crowley kept so much of the play in the adaptation, including the cast and several crew members, this is perhaps the movie with the least amount of Friedkin’s fingerprints on it, although he does a much better job of making this story cinematic as opposed to his previous play adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Right from the opening pan shot, we get crisper editing and a rhythmic feel to the montages as the characters gather together. Despite this achievement, it is a fair argument that virtually any other director could have helmed this project. Perhaps the singular characteristic that Friedkin brings to this story is empathy, not just for the plight of the gays but even those who lash out in anger and ignorance at them. No one here is understood as anything less than a conflicted person.

In Pauline Kael’s review, she bemoaned the idea that the movie or the play was anything but “conventional.” She compared the story to that of The Women, a 1939 movie that helped blaze the trail for subsequent pictures to focus more on ‘women’s issues’ and feelings than in previous decades. Yet, as Kael complains, “those feelings turned out to be the same old need-to-be-understood and need-to-be-loved.” While this certainly remains true for The Boys in the Band, one cannot help but appreciate some of the nuance brought to at least a few of the characters like Donald (Frederick Combs) and Harold (Leonard Frey), who have an inner compass and refuse to be defined by anyone, gay or straight, other than themselves. While this message has, after fifty years, become perhaps too familiar and gays have all but been sidelined by the movement they originated, this movie (and play) stands as a time capsule of where America was regarding their attitude towards minorities, and how much progress has been made since 1970.