Meet the Gay Pioneers Who Made ‘The Boys in the Band’ Happen

Netflix’s The Boys in the Band is, to be blunt, a gay moment. The film adaptation of the stage play is a startling, brutally honest depiction of gay life and gay history—and, in case it wasn’t clear, the whole thing is gay through and through. The film’s arrival on Netflix comes courtesy of superstar producer Ryan Murphy’s contract with the streaming service, and it reunites the all-gay cast and director of the Tony-winning 2018 Broadway revival.

But Netflix’s The Boys in the Band more than just a movie adaptation of a Broadway play. It’s a time capsule. It’s a cherished but unflattering Polaroid snapshot of gay life in 1968. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to be gay in America before the Fab Five, Ellen, Elton, and even Stonewall—here you go. This is it. That’s because The Boys in the Band, as it originally existed 52 years ago, took to the stage thanks to the combined vision and talent of two gay men: playwright Mart Crowley and director Robert Moore.

Here’s your reminder that it’s important to talk about The Gays Who Paved The Way because, even today in the age of Queer Eye and Drag Race, gay history—I’m talking stuff older than Will & Grace reruns—is not part of the pop culture curriculum. Queer people have always been tasked with preserving our own history, passing it down from one generation to the next. And since an entire generation of queer people were stolen by the AIDS epidemic, it makes preserving that history even more important. The truth is, it’s hard to imagine a world where we have a Ryan Murphy if we did not first have a Mart Crowley and a Robert Moore. And even beyond The Boys in the Band, a genuine Off Broadway sensation that shattered barriers, Crowley and Moore contributed to other TV moments that gays grew up loving and are, if you’re me, still living for today.

Mart Crowley and Robert Moore’s lives were intertwined a decade before the debut of The Boys in the Band. The two men first met in the 1950s while studying drama at the Catholic University of America. Moore, eight years Crowley’s senior, already had a Broadway credit to his name thanks to his role as an actor/comic in Irving Berlin’s all-soldier World War II revue show This Is the Army.

Moore starred in that show alongside a number of soldier/performers who would go on to make names for themselves in TV: The Munsters director Ezra Stone; The Donna Reed Show director Gene Nelson; and, like Moore, fellow gay soldiers—and power couple—actor Hayden Rorke (I Dream of Jeannie) and director Justus Addiss (Alfred Hitchcock Presents).

Moore graduated three years before Crowley, giving him a head start on his theater career. Moore bounced around the east coast, directing local theater and summer stock productions in Maryland and Vermont, all the while trying to make it as an actor but instead getting roped into more and more directing gigs.

Upon graduating in 1957, Crowley traded in Washington, D.C. for Hollywood and got a number of jobs with various production companies. It wasn’t until Crowley got a job working on the 1961 drama Splendor in the Grass that the struggling playwright got a big break by making a big friend: iconic Hollywood actor Natalie Wood. The two became fast friends, and Wood hired Crowley as her personal assistant—mostly as a way to give him the money he needed to live on while he worked on his passion projects. One of those projects? The Boys in the Band.

Crowley channeled all of his homosexual fear and self-loathing into the play, putting the lived experiences and raw emotions of himself and the gay men he knew into the mouths of a group of friends attending the cattiest birthday party ever. Nothing like it—a play about the homosexual experience written by a practicing homosexual—had ever been staged before, but Crowley was on a mission to make it happen. And when he ended up in NYC in the late ’60s, crashing on his old old classmate Robert Moore’s couch, he knew he’d found his director.

The problem was, Moore didn’t want to direct. He was an actor, dammit, and he was doing just that in the Broadway production of Cactus Flower with Lauren Bacall. But Crowley persisted and Moore reluctantly read his friend’s play one night while at the theater. Later, Moore would joke (presumably?) that he only agreed to direct The Boys in the Band because he wanted to get Mart off his couch.

The Boys in the Band was a sensation when it opened in April 1968, with its run extending from just four scheduled performances to 1,001. Icons like Jackie Kennedy and Marlene Dietrich sat in the audience as rave reviews rolled in. Moore won a Drama Desk award for his direction. Off the success of Boys in the Band, Moore got even more theater work, including an extensive partnership with Neil Simon that included directing the Broadway debuts of Promises, Promises and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers as well as the theatrical adaptation of Chapter Two. Moore would earn five Tony nominations between 1969 and 1981.

But Moore’s impact wasn’t limited to the stage—although he was noticeably absent from the credits of 1970’s The Boys in the Band film adaptation. While it was assumed Moore would return (the entire original cast came back, and Crowley adapted the script), direction fell to the straight William Friedkin. It’s important to note Friedkin’s sexuality because, as Boys cast member Frederick Combs recalled in an interview, the movie studio wanted a straight director and felt that Moore was too out and too gay to direct… a movie about gay men, written by a gay man, and starring mostly gay men. Friedkin told a different tale: he has claimed that the studio just didn’t want to hand the film over to someone who had never directed a movie—or even a TV show—before.

Moore would fill that gap in his resume a few years after he was passed over to direct the Boys film. He began a working relationship with Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises. The collaboration started with Robert Moore coming on for a guest spot in the 1973 Mary Tyler Moore Show episode “My Brother’s Keeper,” where he played Phyllis’ gay brother Ben.

It was the incredibly rare occurrence of a gay man playing a gay man in an episode co-written by a gay man (Dick Clair). Following that, he directed the season premiere of The Bob Newhart Show in 1974, and then MTM essentially gave him a show of his own: Rhoda.

Robert Moore directed 26 of the first 32 episodes of Rhoda, including the pilot (which set the tone for this brassy and sassy Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff) and the blockbuster TV event, “Rhoda’s Wedding.” That episode was watched by over 52 million people, estimated to be over half of the entire American TV-viewing audience. Robert Moore did that.

What does one do after directing one of the biggest TV events of all time up to that point? Well, Moore jumped to directing TV movies and feature films (like the aforementioned Chapter Two). He even worked with his former collaborator Mart Crowley’s bosses when he directed Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner in a made-for-TV take on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1976.

Speaking of Crowley—the ’70s weren’t as kind to him. The success of The Boys in the Band pigeonholed Crowley as the gay writer, and his subsequent plays about varied topics didn’t live up to that very narrow expectation. And when the 1970 film adaptation endured positive but deeply homophobic reviews (film critics weren’t as progressive as theater critics) and flopped at the box office, Crowley didn’t have much else going on. He worked with Wood and Wagner, throughout the ’70s. Then, sensing that her friend was in dire need of something to do, Wood suggested that Crowley become a creative consultant on her husband’s upcoming show, Hart to Hart.

This new role allowed for Crowley to put his razor-sharp wit in front of TV audiences—audiences that would never have watched The Boys in the Band. But Crowley’s double entendre, puns, and quips did more than give sizzle to Jonathan and Jennifer Hart’s onscreen romance; it also made Hart to Hart one of the campiest, most glamorously gay shows of the ’80s despite starring a straight couple.

But just as Moore’s TV career boomed in the ’70s while Crowley’s career dipped, Crowley’s TV debut coincided with Moore’s decline—not in his talent, but in his health. Moore closed out the ’70s by having three plays on Broadway at the same time, but audiences were robbed of decades of work still to come when his life was cut short. He passed away of AIDS-related pneumonia in May 1984. He was 57. Of course AIDS didn’t stop there. Between 1984 and 1993, AIDS took Moore, Boys in the Band producer Richard Barr, and original Boys actors Robert LaTourneaux, Leonard Frey, Frederick Combs, Keith Prentice, and Kenneth Nelson.

Unlike so many of his peers, both professional and personal, Mart Crowley survived. He continued to write for TV, including an episode of Dynasty and its spinoff, The Colbys. He wrote two of the final Hart to Hart TV movies in the mid-’90s. He lived long enough to not only see his DIY play—a play that first allowed gay people to claim space in pop culture—open on Broadway, 50 years after it opened for what was going to be a tiny run in 1968. He lived long enough to see that revival win a Tony Award. He lived long enough to see so many more gay writers come of age and come into power.

He didn’t live long enough to see The Boys in the Band debut on Netflix. He died in March of this year, following complications from a heart attack. He was 84 years old. But Crowley’s work, and Moore’s work, lives on through what they gave us—through The Boys in the Band, now enjoying new life on Netflix, through other low-key gay touchstones like Rhoda and Hart to Hart, and through all the work of every gay writer and director that has walked through the door that they opened in 1968.

Stream The Boys in the Band on Netflix