I Would Like to See It: The Boys in the Band (Patreon)

It’s your birthday, and the guests are the same friends you’ve had for twenty years. As a snapshot of the simultaneously claustrophobic and sexually liberated lives of gay men in New York immediately prior to the AIDS crisis, The Boys in the Band is almost unbearably tender and painful. Six of the film’s nine principal actors would go on to die of AIDS-related complications over the next several decades, falling away from the world along with that vision of New York’s last sweltering summer before the long, dark winter of the plague began. Led by recovering alcoholic and tormented Catholic writer Michael (Kenneth Nelson) and his dysmorphic Jewish stoner boyfriend Harold (Leonard Frey), the party guests bicker, flirt, reminisce, brawl, fuck, and fall back into a hundred old arguments until finally the night is sucked like the light from a dying star into the black hole of Michael’s narcissistic meltdown. Anyone who’s ever been part of a real flesh and blood queer community, one bonded by necessity and kept together as much by exterior pressure as by any bonds between its members, can tell you at least one story that sounds an awful lot like that evening.

Friedkin, a largely untried director outside documentary filmmaking and still a year away from The French Connection’s breakout success, shoots The Boys in the Band with stage production restraint, apart from the gorgeously framed interiors of his opening montage as the characters ready themselves for Harold’s birthday. There it’s all bustling streets and exquisite lobby hallways in upscale department stores and apartment buildings, New York at the height of its influence on fashion and decor all over America and throughout the rest of the world. Each character is painstakingly styled and costumed, their identity immediately legible through the lens of their presentation. Emory’s (Cliff Gorman) gel-soaked cap of hair and skin-tight shirt, Hank’s (Laurence Luckinbill) worn denim, Michael’s lovely but subtly conservative sweaters and haircut — it all plays beautifully off of outsider Alan McCarthy (Peter White), who spends the film in a tux getting increasingly drunk and, depending on one’s interpretation of his arc, doubling down on his closeted homosexuality.

It’s that contrast which forms the heart of the conflict between the film’s characters. These men are in each other’s lives because there’s nowhere else for them to be, thrown together in spite of their radically different backgrounds and ways of being and forced to make do with one another’s love and company. Michael’s sadistic game of telephone in which he bullies his guests one by one into calling “the only person [they’ve] ever loved” and expressing that love is only a more flagrant and brutal display of those same underlying divisions, a way to rub everyone’s faces in the fact that they’ve all been shut out of a hundred other versions of their lives, a hundred other hearts. Even when they manage to succeed, to get by, they are in some sense living in the ruins of the lives they might have had if only they’d been straight. It’s a bitter, hateful thing, but beneath it is a real sense of love and community, a sense that while Michael’s friends may be angry with him, they won’t leave him alone with his demons. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Harold says gently after dressing Michael down in front of everyone else. All they have is each other, but that’s something. It’s real. It matters.