Mart Crowley’s play “The Boys in the Band” was a genuine provocation during its 1968 Off Broadway run. An account of a gay man’s birthday party in the West Village, crashed by a straight college buddy, it earned its writer disapprobation with respect to its ostensible display of self-hating homosexuals.
A counter argument to that notion may be summed up, in a sense, by the title of a 1971 Rosa von Praunheim film: “It’s Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society In Which He Lives.” William Friedkin’s 1970 film version of Crowley’s play underscored this idea by focusing on the character of Harold, the birthday celebrant.