Shades of Lavender

"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." That line is the summing up of the hero and the film, The Boys in the Band. Adapted from Mart Crowley's off-Broadway hit, the movie suffers slightly from its exposure to air--from the process of "opening up" the work to include exteriors and reaction shots. The play took place in a single, narrow set that seemed like a down elevator to hell. Onscreen, the claustrophobic atmosphere has been dissipated. But the cast and, more important, the lines remain brilliantly bitchy and incisive.

In Greenwich Village, an edgy "queen" named Michael (Kenneth Nelson) throws a birthday party for his intimate enemy, Harold (Leonard Frey). The guests are all various shades of lavender. They range from muscular stud to the outrageously effeminate Emory (Cliff Gorman), who arrives with a "present": a $20-a-trick midnight cowboy* (Robert La Tourneaux). All of the people at the party bring hang-ups along with their gifts; one man has left his wife and children for a promiscuous partner; a Negro labeled "the queen of spades" suffers for his skin and his psyche; the host himself is a much-analyzed Roman Catholic who can neither take his inversion nor leave it alone.

Out of guilt is born hostility. The party starts with deprecating "in" jokes: "There's one thing to be said for masturbation: you certainly don't have to look your best." But the precious pad is soon converted into an operating theater where each guest is a subject for dissection and all the others are angry surgeons.

Motherless Sons. The most savage sequence is a telephone game blundered into by Alan (Peter White), a possible "straight" who was once the host's college roommate. Each player must dial, and then blurt "I love you" to the person he holds dearest. All the players are stoned out of their minds, but not out of their situations. Amid the four-letter confrontations, ugly--and sometimes beautiful--revelations occur, until finally the game's inventor is buried alive in a landslide of truths.

Through it all, Crowley moves like a recording angel, catching every nuance, every diphthong of homosexual patter. But the script is marked by more than an appraiser's eye and an unforgetting ear. The author well knows the men Proust called "sons without a mother." He delineates the reliance on alcohol and drugs to pull a shade over the mind; the loveless encounters that begin with need and end with arrest; the deadly message of the mirror that announces the ebbing of the physical attractiveness that is the homosexual's main solace.

Though The Boys in the Band occasionally tries too hard to be moving, forcing wails and laments to the surface, the film needs no such theatrics. In the hands of such masters as Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, individuals were always shown to be deviates first and human beings second. Crowley has done the reverse. If the situation of the homosexual is ever to be understood by the public, it will be because of the breakthrough made by this humane, moving picture.

* The newspaper ad for the R-rated movie, showing the "present" and the guest of honor, has provoked a few more hang-ups. When it was first submitted, it was refused by all major daily newspapers in Chicago, San Francisco and Boston. It was also turned down by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News.

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