All day Saturday, June 28, 1969 people came from across Manhattan to stare at the burned and blackened Stonewall Inn. What had happened the night before captured the imagination – it didn’t matter if you were gay or straight, a Greenwich Village local or a curious tourist – something changed that weekend, a switch was thrown, and the western world’s attitude to the human rights of homosexuals would begin to undergo a rapid change.

What has become known as the Stonewall riots would continue on sporadically into the early days of July, police and gay Village residents having numerous altercations as both groups antagonised each other. But what had started as a rebellion on a single Manhattan street quickly spread throughout New York, and then the United States, and then the rest of the world.

In the US, a change of attitude coursed through the gay community. The Mattachine Society, which had worked in a conservative fashion throughout the 50s and 60s to establish gay rights, was virtually swept aside by the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. Gay Pride was the new catch-cry, and any references to the recent past of furtive meetings, self-loathing and guilt were rejected out of hand.

The arts scene wasn’t exempt, one of the first victims of the new movement being Mart Crowley’s 1968 play, The Boys in the Band and, in particular, its subsequent 1970 motion picture adaptation, released just a few months before the first Gay Pride March, held on June 28 in honour of the rebellion at Stonewall just a year earlier.

The William Friedkin-directed film was something of a rabbit in the headlights. Generally admired by mainstream critics of the period, The Boys in the Band quickly came to be seen as a relic of an almost ancient time and was self-consciously buried by queer cultural historians.

While the play was revived in the mid 90s as something of a curio, the present day sees The Boys in the Band’s cinematic relevance once again on the rise. With the never ceasing drive in western society for equal gay rights – which achieved another milestone earlier this month through the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Washington, DC – 2010 finds the film’s relevance shifting beyond its queer cinema roots and coming to life in a different way, the universality of its deeper concerns striking a profound note with any viewer – gay or straight – and rendering it a very moving picture.

Crowley himself handled the screen adaptation, keeping the action of The Boys in the Band largely confined to the Manhattan apartment of Michael (Kenneth Nelson), a 30-something homosexual debt-ridden globetrotter and guilt-ridden Catholic newly sworn off the bottle. Michael is preparing his East Side pad for a birthday party, aided by his cagily critical weekend lover, Donald (Frederick Combs).

Soon joining them are irrepressible queen Emory (Cliff Gorman), the quarrelling couple of teacher Hank (Laurence Luckinbill) and fashion photographer Larry (Keith Prentice), laid-back black bookstore clerk Bernard (Reuben Greene), and two outsiders: a callow male prostitute (Robert La Tourneaux) seriously out of his depth, and Michael’s upper crust college friend in crisis Alan (Peter White), who boggles at this alien bunch of homosexual men.

As the evening progresses and the alcohol flows freely, the knives eventually come out, with the guest of honour, Harold (Leonard Frey), arriving at his own party just in time to provide a dry-witted blow-by-blow on the destructive bloodletting that will culminate in a horrifying telephone truth game.

Aside from the political and social discussion at the time of its release, Crowley’s original play came in for criticism from certain quarters for too closely resembling Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? in its nasty, destructive second half. It’s an understandable sentiment, but ignores Boys’ other sources of inspiration, of which the Alfred Hitchcock-directed Rope was high on the list. Indeed, viewed contemporarily, The Boys in the Band is like a well-drilled cross between Woolf?, Rope and the more modern Hurlyburly.

Hurlyburly itself suffered a fist-dragging celluloid version, but a sharp cinema adaptation is really what makes The Boys in the Band so exceptional: it’s a play that’s better for being on the screen. Credit should certainly go to Crowley for efficiently retooling his own work, but the real reason for the film’s success is the work of director William Friedkin.

It’s easy to think of the filmmaker who would a year later direct The French Connection as a cat in a cage when working on the screen adaptation of a stage play. But Friedkin was fresh off adapting Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, and brought the skills learned on that production to bear on Boys. He and cinematographer Arthur Ornitz shot the action with a precise fluidity that never became distracting and, in collaboration with production designer John Robert Lloyd, managed to make Michael’s apartment becomes another character in the drama, an early engaging brightness slowly turning to a baleful gloom, the change in mood driven by Crowley’s smarting, untouchable dialogue.

Watching the film now, the large cast remains uniformly excellent, with the performers tightly bound after so many months of performing the show together off-Broadway; it’s in large part down to their elegant interplay that the number of characters never feels too weighty for the screenplay.

Most of the critical attention at the time focussed on the silver-tongued spite of Emory, Harold and Michael, but largely ignored perhaps the two most effective characters of Hank and Larry. Amid all the pointed nastiness that runs through the second half of the film it’s these two who come to some sort of quiet, delicate and beautiful understanding. Friedkin has stated that Laurence Luckinbill is his favourite performer in the film and it’s a hard point to argue, the actor turning in a sublime take on the mild-mannered Hank, a man not long separated from his wife and still coming to terms with his homosexuality.

While certainly a product of its pre-Stonewall times, to now dismiss The Boys in the Band as ‘dated’ would perhaps be a mistake. In the realm of queer cinema it’s certainly a period piece and the bitter gaming of the second half can make for torrid viewing, but time changes the relevance of art and time and social progression have helped peel a layer from this film, exposing its themes of self-doubt and loathing to a much wider audience. Michael’s struggle to balance his sexual preference with his Catholicism is something that any person of religious upbringing can relate to, the forbidden proclivities of the modern world being a constant challenge to the demands of faith. These men may be struggling to free themselves from the pre-liberation closet, but every human being tries to face up to the darker, more profound corners of their personality, and it’s on this level that The Boys in the Band is a touching, almost inspiring experience.

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