This Boys Life

Style maven Carson Kressley says it’s “kind of like Friends without Prozac.” Broadway star Cheyenne Jackson describes it as “a bunch of queens getting drunk.” Playwright Edward Albee “found it a highly skillful work [pause] that I despised.” Everyone has an opinion about the film The Boys in the Band, based on Mart Crowley's 1968 play, as we hear in the appropriately reverent, ever-so-cheeky documentary Making the Boys (shown at the Tribeca Film Festival). But one thing they all agree on: Those nine tart-tongued boys and their bitchy birthday party opened the (closet) door for decades of gay entertainment.

Before making The Band‚ Crowley had been biding his time in Hollywood — serving as a gopher for Natalie Wood (they later became great friends)‚ writing a pilot for the never-picked-up Bette Davis Show, partying at L.A. hotspots like Ciro’s (“Everybody knew I was gay but nobody seemed to mind it‚” he recalls). But when he hunkered down with a pile of legal pads to work on his play, he had no idea he was making homo history: “How did I know what I was doing?” shrugged the playwright in a recent Q&A. “I didn’t know. It just came out.”  

Using celeb interviews, news footage, file photos, and an appropriate amount of disco music, Making the Boys goes all the way back to before Stonewall, and comes all the way up to Prop 8. “Do we need another Boys in the Band-type piece of entertainment?” says Bravo exec Andy Cohen. “Yes!” Sounds like a gauntlet has been thrown.


Making the Boys was shown as a work-in-progress at the Tribeca Film Festival. Further details on distribution are not yet available.