Parting Glances: Band Tunes Remembered

Mort Crowley's "Boys In the Band" opened Off-Broadway almost 50 years ago. I bought a copy of the play in Chicago in 1968 and read dialog aloud while driving back to Detroit with my then partner Larry Stetson.
We saw a local production a year later at the Rivera, a long-vanished movie house briefly turned legit stage, starring Wayne University theater grad Paul Pentecost.
Seeing gay life as we sometimes found ourselves living it proved fascinating: a big city birthday party turned "truth game," with much drinking, lot'sa line dancing to the sweet turn-on sounds of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love." A play about us.
"Boys" opened – timely – one year before New York City's liberating Stonewall Riots. (The same year Rev. Troy Perry started the first Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles.) Change was in the air. "Boys" was exciting on two counts. It was gay from start to finish with camp humor putdown and rough trade.
And – score one up for me – I had spent a romantic week with one of its Off-Broadway production actors: Frederick Combs, who played Donald in both the play and in the film version.
I met "Honey Combs" at Detroit's Woodward Bar. He was appearing in 18-year-old British playwright Shelagh Delaney's international hit, "A Taste of Honey," at the Fisher Theater in the fall 1996. He played Geoffrey, a gay artist. It was his big break. The cast included legendary Uta Hagan. The start of Freddy's promising career.
Freddy was staying at the Wardell Sheraton hotel, later Park Shelton Apartments. (I later lived there for 24 years. The property was once owned by comic Gilda Radner, of Saturday Night Live fame.)
He told me his two high school drama teachers believed he had talent and much promise and paid for his ticket to New York to study acting. He also confided he had been brought out by an Army sergeant when he was 16.
I followed him to Chicago New Year's week, but was gently told our final curtain had rung down in Detroit. I never saw him again, but in 1970 had the pleasure of seeing him playing Donald when "Boys In the Band" was made into a movie. (His thespian buns are glimpsingly preserved for posterity.)
Looking back at Crowley's pre-Stonewall play, given all that's happened – Gay Liberation, the AIDS crisis, Clinton's Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy, Ellen Degeneres, "Brokeback Mountain", "Angels in America," "The Laramie Project," – "Boys" remains entertaining, well-crafted, compelling, if somewhat gay self-loathing.
Its characters are guys of another time and place who have yet to shake off the closeting onus placed upon them by religion, psychiatry, police, politics and even the Mafia – you name it. Just about everyone and everything straightjacketing.
Given as much, today we either like the play for its moments of history replayed or loathe it for its internalized homophobia; nonetheless, it's courageous, especially compared to cautious plays dealing with homosexuality preceding it, like "The Children's Hour" and "Tea and Sympathy."
The boys in "Boys" are who they are in spite of a culture that demonizes them.
Frederick Combs' later career included writing, producing and directing an Off-Broadway mystery play that got soundly panned, prompting him to leave New York for LA. He then appeared in TV soaps and miniseries and for a time ran his own drama school. He died from AIDS-related complications on Sept. 19, 1992. Many "Boys" cast members also died from AIDS.
Frederick was 57. His acting talent, face – and rather memorable backside anatomy – are available for repeated viewing on DVD. I watched the movie this week and remembered when…
And as one of the old boys in an old band I'm still grateful to be tootin' my horn. On or off-key. As for my art, to quote from the play: "It takes a fairy to make something pretty."