Show me a happy homosexual, and Ill show you a gay corpse, a swanning Catholic with maxed-out credit cards and a snazzy Manhattan apartment sneers in The Boys in the Band, a play that has done little but sour since 1968, when it premiered Off-Broadway like a sizzling cherry bomb.

That year is significant: Its the moment Hollywoods prudish production code which considered homosexuality sex perversion fully crumbled, opening the door to grittier, more candid cinema. Its also the year the DSM changed its classification of homosexuality from outright paraphilia to mere sexual orientation disturbance. (How generous.) The world was, in some sense, readying itself for the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the approaching decades queer crescendo: the steady decriminalization of gay behavior, the election of Harvey Milk, the free-love mecca that was Studio 54. Mart Crowley, the playwright responsible for The Boys in the Band, had a hand in steering culture in that direction.

And yet, from the moment the play debuted, and even more when William Friedkin turned it into a movie in 1970, Boys was divisive. On the one hand, gay visibility made headway on the national stage; on the other, it did so via a stereotypical portrait whose self-loathing characters became a sad generational touchstone.

The tragicomedys central band eight gay men (including a hired hustler) and one maybe-straight interloper gathering to celebrate their friend Harolds 32nd birthday comprises a treasury of show-offs forever one-upping each other with biting quips and clawing jabs. Alcohol flows, blood spills, resentments emerge. This, according to Crowleys writing, is what cosmopolitan gay companionship looked like in the pre-internet era: dipped in vinegar and flecked with the antipathy of Edward Albees Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Todays talk of communities, safe spaces and normalization was coded at best. But there wasnt much queer-themed pop culture to be found, and The Boys in the Band proved immensely popular, running for more than 1,000 performances in New York and mounting a rendition in London.