“What I am, Michael, is a 32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy. And if it takes me a while to pull myself together, and if I can smoke a little grass before I get nerve to show this face to the world, it’s nobody’s goddamn business but my own.”

The cutting words of The Boys In The Band’s sharp-tongued Harold aren’t just one of the most hyper-aware self-assessments in the history of filmdom — they’re a fitting tagline for a landmark movie that’s as many simultaneous things as Harold, its birthday boy is.

At once a social document, wry sexploitation flick, hissing bitchfest, repository for immortal camp dialogue, midnight movie, urban character study, bleak outsider period piece, and parlor drama run amuck, The Boys In The Band has managed to endear and repel, engage and repulse, disarm and dismay its viewers in equal measure, and as it nears the big 4-0, it’s apt that as the film reaches midlife crisis time, its target audience finds itself at a heady vantage point of not only looking back at a turbulent past, but looking forward to as precarious a future.

By now, scribe Mart Crowley’s watershed 1968 Off-Broadway production that inspired the film has become a part of New York history and Big Apple mythology beyond.

Arriving on the scene just over a year prior to the Stonewall Rebellion (“Homo Nest Raided — Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad” would ultimately be the dickish New York Daily Post headline) Boys leapt more than its fair share of hurdles, and thanks to playwright Crowley’s perseverance — and production backing from gal pal Natalie Wood — became a sensation that attracted both uptowners and downtowers alike during a thousand-and-one-night run that would do Scheherazade proud.

With Hollywood woefully out of of step with youth culture — who’d have thought that big budget musical misfires like Dr. Doolittle and Hello, Dolly! wouldn’t pack the kids into theaters — and feeling the heat from television, domestic drive-in production houses, and foreign exploitation companies, the studios were ready to gamble by the mid-60s, lensing some wonderful (and wonderfully terrible) forays built around timely catchpenny topics like drug culture, Blaxploitation, bikers, prostitution, swinging suburbanites, drop-out hippies, gay dramedies, transsexual travesties, and various counterculture freak-outs.

This was the era that gave us still mind-warping happenings like Skidoo, The Swinger, The Tenth Victim, Danger: Diabolik, Casino Royale, and Ciao! Manhattan. 1970 was the Year of Queer, with big and little offerings like Myra Breckinridge, The Christine Jorgenson Story, Song of The Loon, Trash, Meatrack, the Boys-style Sticks & Stones, and Beyond The Valley of The Dolls hitting screens to varying degrees of success and scorn.

Shrewd Crowley was with-it enough to insist that the original, largely unknown ensemble stage cast be employed for the feature film — it’s easy to see how the casting of, say, Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier would’ve have blunted the movie’s edge — and as cameras rolled in the play’s native New York, Boys found itself in a unique moment of time where it had the luxury of being able to pull few of its punches, many of them directed squarely at its target audience’s own glass jaw.

The setting: an Upper East Side apartment, select exteriors of which were actually shot on the balcony of Tammy Grimes’s digs.

The event: a birthday party for the enigmatic and forebodingly absent Harold.

The cast: Michael (Kenneth Nelson left), host, snappy raconteur, and sartorial butterfly; Donald (Frederick Combs), his somewhat shiftless sort-of boyfriend; Hank (Laurence Luckinbill), a recently-divorced and recently-out teacher; foxy fashion shutterbug Larry (Keith Prentice), Larry’s play-the-field live-in boyfriend; Emory (Cliff Gorman), a swish interior decorator with more one-liners than a Bob Hope U.S.O. Tour; Bernard (Reuben Greene), a book store clerk, and like Emory, an ethnic wild card in a deck of over-the-top White Queens; party crasher Alan McCarthy (Peter White), Michael’s fraying-at-the-seams, straight, and impossibly WASPy college friend who, significantly or no, is the only character with a last name; and a just-off the corner hustler in cowboy drag with the dubious moniker Tex (Robert La Tourneaux), procured as gift by Emory for the guest of honor.

By the time Harold (the scene-stealing Leonard Fry, having essayed Laurence Faggot in the previous year’s The Magic Christian) wafts in phantom-like out of the night, the booze is already out and claws are already bared, the party in no short order devolving into a free-for-all of barbs, recriminations, fistfights, pitfall party games, tearful confessions, and fractured ties.

Boys was a gambit from frame one, with two male-on-male kisses (only the impersonal one between Harold and Tex would make the final cut), marijuana use, hooking, ethnic slurs, and frank dialogue ensuring that it received little to none in the way of distribution in flyover states and outside urban centers.

Newspapers refused to run the film’s promotional one-sheet — a manifestation of the friction of substance versus beauty that’s a perpetual thorn in the side of gay culture — provocatively juxtaposing Harold and Tex. Critics also were divided, some praising the enterprise as honest, unflinching, and brave, while others wrote it off wholesale as a tawdry minstrel show that managed to be alternately torpid and hysterical. Still, in hindsight, it’s impossible not to appreciate the risk that everyone involved in the project took in a decade where gays were still deemed threats to national security (everything old is new again, it would seem).

A few years back, I worked in an incredibly antiquated and Dickensian theatrical licensing house in downtown Manhattan replete with all manner of fire hazards and rats in my desk. One of my co-workers delighted in showing me the office’s resident crank letter bureau, a quagmire of venomous letters dating back all the way to the ’30s and issued from Middle America to blast controversial theatrical productions. Few titles drew the ire that the gay-themed ones did (Boys was a reviled quarry), and even beloved film and TV actors who just played gay for the stage took heat in the form of threats of violent reprisals, boycotts, arcane Bible prophecies, and reprehensible grammar for just doing their jobs.

The film’s cred took serious hits by the time the Big ’80s rolled around, with shifting politics and a desire to shrug off the yokes of yesteryear leading many to dismiss the film as old hat and badly cliched. By contemporary standards, some of the project’s signifiers do seem sore-thumb.

Both Michael’s and Donald’s dictions are laced with affected ennui — both have the pretentious habit of using a rhetorical “One must…” or “One shouldn’t…” manner of speak — that come off as too-practiced. Vain Michael has not only acres of cosmetics in his bathroom, but a cache of high-end designer sweaters that would make even the Huxtables advise him to dial it down a little, while Donald drives a petal pink VW. Emory sports an awful pixie ‘do and some truly monstrous ’70s fashions, and even has the most eye-rolling of gay-revealing shorthands: the frou frou white dog.

Michael’s a resounding mess despite being the seeming leader of the pack (he and Harold vie for dominance, but Harold’s presence seems far more remote) — a cruel drunk, pill-addled basket case, guilt-ridden semi-lapsed Catholic, and perpetrator of the sin we’re all supposed to be guilty of: being (apparently) too well-heeled and well-off. He even somewhat brings down neurotic Donald, himself burdened with family resentments — that institution that is lauded as a cure-all but for many of us is the problem — and relying on a head shrinker to help him sort it all out.

Bernard is left to weather catty racist barbs at his lone expense, proving even minorities are prone to considering themselves above some other lesser caste. Initially appearing to be the most well-adjusted of the lot, Bernard’s rather pathetic lovelorn reminiscing about his transgressive love for white son of a childhood employer causes him to be the first to derail into a drunken stupor, something of an unintended-if-effective inversion of Night of The Living Dead’s black hero rising to the challenge while its white heroine falls into a similar catatonic state from which, like Bernard, we never get to see her recover from.

Much has been made about the is-he-or-isn’t he? odd-man-out Alan. My take is almost certainly he is, given his seriously reactionary beat-down on Emory and enough of his lines being so heavy with subtext that they could fall like anvils.

It was ultimately the cipher Tex (left) who left me wondering, though. How many dumb-as-a-parking-cone hustlers do you come across who apparently come from a far off place where lasagna is a far-flung delicacy? I never could quite get a pulse on what Tex’s scene was, and his utter alienation from everything the boys espouse — save grass — made him seem hazy around the edges, almost like those non-entities we meet in life who don’t seem to fully exist and could easily have strayed in from someone’s waking dream.

Harold (do note that minus the acne-scarred makeup and perm, Leonard Frey actually has a Henry Winkler thing going on and like The Fonz, is a forerunner of the Hot Jew trend we enjoy today) has the debilitating triumvirate of a suffocating mother, bitterly cynical worldview, and obsessive/compulsive fixation on masking his face. Hank, Larry, and Bernard are the most attractive and are able to pass, which sets up something of an uncomfortable (and realistic) discord between the group’s berating of its sissy whipping boy Emory, who curiously acts defiantly toward everyone save Harold, to whom he has a sycophantic devotion toward.

Undercutting expectations, it’s Harold and Emory — the gang’s femmes — who may be the most self-possessed and tough-willed members of the band, Harold knowing his strength lies in his wit and withering skill at irony, and Emory having the spine to be himself when everyone outside the group he encounters reacts to him as if he were an escaped carnival freak.

One scene has him at a crosswalk as he receives the side-eye from an obese woman, causing him to murmur “fucking bitch” under his breath, something everyone one of us can relate to instantly. Indeed, the scenes with Emory (literally and figuratively) out and about brought to my mind a time on an identical Big Apple street when I saw a little person just walking along like anyone else would take for granted while being snickered at by male pedestrians. It’s moments like those where it hits home just how truly loathsome and conformity-imperative humanity really is.

It’s Hank and Larry who now seem the most timely, with Hank ending his sham marriage to be with too-cavalier Larry and experiencing frustration that his first gay pairing can’t or won’t conform to the “love, honor, and obey” het standard he’s known. It’s significant that the film’s sole vision of unburdened, carefree happiness comes in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it form of a doe-eyed glamor girl (uncredited Bond Girl Maud Adams) whom Larry photographs.

Critics have rightly picked up on the film’s horror iconography, a trend in gay films that started with Universal’s wildly queer monster epics and continues to be extant today. The horror of…the gay is easily recognizable to keen-eyed viewers, and Boys is no exception. In his indispensable Monsters In The Closet: Homosexuality & The Horror Film, Harry M. Benshoff makes a great case that even the most sympathetic and terra firma-set gay dramas from the period couldn’t help themselves from instilling traces of otherworldly sturm und drang that were mainstays in horror flicks and alarmist Homosexual Menace pseudo-documentaries into their own narratives.

As Benshoff cannily argues, “thunder and lightning, Expressionist shadows, ominous musical cues, and hysterical moments of formal excess” are common Gay Monster motifs, and all are present in Boys. Alan is framed so shadowily and menacingly during his bedroom conversation with Michael that the whole set piece has the feel of a Night Must Fall-esque murder thriller wherein a character slowly comes to realize they’re trapped in room with…a madman!

Thunderclaps and a creepy rain storm signal the party’s turn from vaguely tense get-together to all-out shriekfest. Michael’s grandiose portrait of himself brings to mind shades of The Picture of Dorian Gray (adapted the same year with a luridly gay undercurrent and starring The Damned ’s Helmut Berger). Shattering glass is tellingly employed and has always been the visual representation of a broken mind.

Harold’s introduction in particular is the most obvious case of horror movie cribbing, with the mysterious birthday boy framed and lit as if Spring Heeled Jack himself had come to call. It’s easy to view director William Friedkin’s — credited with sidelining the filmed play approach that sunk The Bad Seed’s movie adaptation — later dark-as-midnight gay slasher Cruising as opting to simply foreground all the shuddery menace Boys only hints at. Michael’s biting “It’s not always the way it is in plays! Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story!” tirade directed at Alan suggests Crowley was well-aware of the conventions of the Dead Queer Genre.

Even when viewed as pre-AIDS period piece, Boys still can’t escape the specter of what was to come. Donald’s then-innocuous mention that his analyst had to cancel his appointment because he’d come down with a “virus or something” made me wince. With HIV now being believed to have existed unknown and undiagnosed as early as the turn of century and beginning to invade American coastal metropolises in the ’60s, it’s no mental feat to picture any of the characters crossing paths with a Gaetan Dugas Typhoid Mary in the still free-and-easy ’70s. No one can deny the pall of doom that hangs over the picture, with cast members Nelson, Combs, Prentice, La Tourneaux, and Frey all not surviving to see the film’s reputation rehabilitated in the national gestalt.

Given today’s tone, Boys deserves and has received critical reappraisal. The 1996 revival production helped to repopularize the film, and its New York ambience has a welcome authenticity in a time when fewer movies are being lensed in the Big Apple thanks to costly permits and skyrocketing production costs. The big city in Boys is neither Vancouver-as-New-York nor a blandly set-bound Friends megalopolis with a diluted Land’s End catalog cast free of any sexual difference or ethnicity.

An initial viewing may prove to be too-much to take — my encounter with the film during my sophomore year of college became a handbook for the type of urban queer I went out of my way not to become — but repeated viewings have softened me. Even its hardcore detractors may find themselves hard-pressed to claim Boys has lost all relevance. With de facto and de jure gay segregation still casting us as a second class citizenry — and much of their rhetoric being drummed up by Boys-redolent closet cases who can’t manage to break free of the past — the same old song continues to daunt, and our band still summons up its will to play on.