"The Imitation Of Life..."

It was in fact made into a 1970 film...

The film, "The Boys In The Band" was one of the very first depictions of what it meant to be gay that I'd ever seen.  I first saw it on late night Canadian television (broadcast from Windsor - across the Detroit River) when I was about 16 years old.  I was mesmerized by the images I saw and on some levels repulsed by the stereotypes that I'd been taught my entire life up to that time were evil and debased.  In my own terribly conflicted world of denial and self-loathing, I nevertheless discovered a glimmer of hope in these seemingly incredible characters from the before Stonewall era that I watched in secret late one warm summer night.

Emory, was depicted as perhaps the "quintessential fag." He was everything I was being told (without ever discussing it openly) not to become.  Yet, even as I felt a mild distaste for the high camp that was a marker of his character, by the end of the film, he was my hero - Of his group of friends, he emerges as the bravest by recognizing and embracing the truth of his creation.

I remember feeling a strange attraction to the character of Donald.  Here was a normal enough looking gay guy, who was trying to reconcile his reality to his life through psychoanalysis and medication and yet  managing to have friends and relationships.  Donald's shower scene in Michael's bathroom was both scandalous and salacious in my mind.  I remember replaying that scene many times when years later I got my first VCR and recorded a copy off the air from CBET-TV.  That shower scene was for many years the closest thing I'd ever seen to gay porn.

Michael was a complicated character that I struggled to understand.  Not quite as campy as Emory, but not quite as "straight-acting" as Donald.  Michael  had style and "gay panache," but Michael also had demons.  Michael's unsettled, debt-ridden life tinged with religiosity and internalized homophobia made his character a hard one for me to empathize with.  I didn't like the way he turned on his friends and he was the voice of anti-gay hatred while he himself was a stereotypical gay man.

Michael's unlikely friendship with Bernard was in my mind, a hopeful sign.  Bernard was the lone black man in this group of friends.  He was gay and black, and despite all the challenges that went along with that, he somehow seemed more well-adjusted than many of the others.  When I reflected on the character of Bernard, in the back of my mind it gave me hope that perhaps a less than miserable future might await me as a black man who might someday accept that he too was gay. I thought - Maybe I could be like Bernard.  His unique role in "The Boys..." reinforced that society was indeed changing.

Michael's straight and married, but troubled college friend, Alan was the biggest anomaly in the story for me - How could he not have figured out the reality of his friend Michael's life.  I remember that this confirmed for me in some dark corner at the back of my mind that indeed, this thing that I was refusing to acknowledge, it could somehow be hidden from the world with some degree of success.  In that moment, at the climax of "the telephone game" when he wins all the points and it's realized that it's his wife he's speaking with, I remember tears streaming from my eyes while feeling happy for him and at the same time feeling jealous in knowing that no matter how much I prayed for it, his reality could never be possible for me.

The relationship of Larry and Hank was perhaps the most confusing and yet thrilling for me.  They were like a married couple... All the aspects were there, jealousy, infidelity, petty squabbles and yes, true love and deep and abiding passion.  Both Hank and Larry had few "obviously gay traits."  If not for Larry's profession as a fashion photographer, one mightn't have ever thought of him as a gay man.  Hank was even more non-stereo-typically gay.  He was a school teacher, was married (but divorcing a woman) and had children. Yet, he and Larry were acknowledged by all (including eventually, Alan) as a couple and as living a life together that their friends envied.  In those moments of my young life, when I contemplated what life might be like if I could just accept that I was gay, I wanted to be Hank.

And then there was Harold... Harold, was both flamboyantly gay and Jewish, and yet he had managed to navigate the pitfalls of his era and his background to find a measure of peace, if not happiness in his life.  But I didn't want to be like Harold either.  He either wasn't willing to hide himself or he couldn't and because of that, he had many of the same demons as Michael.  In the end, he seemed resigned to an unhappy but tolerable life.

Finally, there was "Cowboy," the not too smart, young gay prostitute.  He confirmed for me everything that I had heard about and thought was representative of being gay and that I would cling to for years as an excuse for denying  my own reality.  I didn't want to be like "Cowboy" and I believed that if the things I'd heard people say about gays were true, it was unavoidable.  "Cowboy's" life existed in sharp juxtaposition to Hank and Larry's and it confused and worried me that two outcomes so diametrically opposed could be possible.

I next saw Mart Crowley's "The Boys In The Band" (again on late night televison) in 1982.  I was 18 years old and away from home for the first time in my life.  That year, I'd met and befriended my first gay person who would go on to be my best friend during my first college days.  And that year, I'd also witnessed another classmate suffer terrible abuses at the hands of "everyday" homophobes in our class who tortured him in every moment of every day until after a few weeks he left school and was never seen or heard from again.  When I watched "The Boys..." this time, I realized that this film had in some ways changed my life.  Despite what I'd seen happen to my tortured classmate, for the first time, I considered accepting the truth of my own heart.

Over the years, since that first time seeing "The Boys In The Band" I would watch it every now and then during those lonely and confusing years of my life when I still lived in denial about the truth of my heart.  I'd escape for 118 minutes to a world where maybe I could be happy like Hank, or free like Bernard, or even liberated enough not to care what anyone else thought like Emory or Harold...  But in the end, for many of those 22 years that followed, I feared that I'd become Michael or even "Cowboy."  For some of those years I dreamed that maybe I could be Alan... Like Hank, I even survived a doomed marriage to a woman my heart couldn't love.  But thankfully, I finally accepted the truth of my heart... I am a same gender loving man and I've managed to find some happiness just like Hank.

"Fear Eats the Soul"