Part Hollywood gossip-fest, part gay history primer, Making the Boys is an entertaining documentary that makes a good case for the significance of The Boys in the Band, the first mainstream drama to take as its subject the everyday existence of gay men.
The play was hailed as a breakthrough when it premiered in NYC in 1968, and subsequently went on to a five-year run on Broadway followed by a film version directed by William (The Exorcist) Friedkin. But Boys suffered a backlash post-Stonewall when newly empowered activists viewed the characters’ bitchiness and self-hatred as a damagingly retrograde stereotype.
This article appears in Oct 7-13, 2010.