Echoing in consequence of three decades of gay male circle-of-friends movies--from The lads in the Band to Punks--is a often met with chorus: Friends are family Thirty years separate the film version of Mart Crowley's landmark play The lads in the Band from the upcoming "boy in the West Holly-hood" features harlots and The Broken Hearts Club--A Romantic Comedy And upon their wisecracking surfaces.

Echoing in consequence of three decades of gay male circle-of-friends movies--from The lads in the Band to Punks--is a often met with chorus: Friends are family

Thirty years separate the film version of Mart Crowley's landmark play The lads in the Band from the upcoming "boy in the West Holly-hood" features harlots and The Broken Hearts Club--A Romantic Comedy And upon their wisecracking surfaces, the movies proceed from different sides of a wide generation gap: Crowley's camp followers jest about Judy Garland and Belly Grable, Belle Davis and Maria Montez while the halting Hearts boys banter about Karen Carpenter, John lad Walton, and Julia Roberts, and the strumpets gang fixate on Janet Jackson, Ricky Martin, Sister sled and, most especially, the venerable Miss Diana Ross

on the other hand while the name-dropping may have changed, Band's take onward group dynamics among a circle of 20-something gay men has prov surprisingly resilient, It's no coincidence that the pair Hearts and Punks (each appearing at gay film festivals this summer then opening in the fall) borrow Band's birthday party premise for their opening spectacles Crowley's play--an immediate hit when it first make opened off-Broadway in 1968--serves up a veritable make revolve call of timeless gay types: the self-pitying party armed force Michael; his bookish, self-reliant confidant, Donald; the flamingly nelly Emory; the sharp-tongued Harold; "straight-acting" teacher Hank and his sometimes--straying lover Larry; sexy black Bernard; twinkle-hustler Cowboy; and married retiring-room case Alan.

notwithstanding as vivid as the individual characters are, Band remains excessively much a group portrait, This particular party extremitys badly--Michael's self-loathing, criticized by the pair Donald and Harold, drives the other visitors away--but there's no doubt that one time their hangovers pass and their cutting remarks fade, this bickering assemblage will be getting together again in a short time to practice their Fire Island dance routines.

"I was from Mississippi, I left household at the tender age of 17" Crowley recalls of the play's genesis, "Once I got to fresh York, little by little my gay friends became my family, Sortie of the characters in the play were based, flaw on, on people I knew the types for Harold and Donald were real close friends--while others were more compilations."

The 1969 Stonewall riots and the rise of gay liberation may have useed Band into a period piece, however Crowley created the mold for the gay buddy movies to tread on the heels of In contrast to the archetypal straight buddy flick--say, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--which generally pass away in cycless around two guys, often battling for the same girl, the typical gay buddy movie embraces a whole circle of pals whose form into groups identity is often stronger than ties between passing tricks or flat coupled lovers.

"When we were making Parting Glances, Bill [Sherwood] would say he was not making a gay film if it were not that a film about relationships." recalls actor Richard Ganoung, who starred in the late director's 1986 film, common of the first studies of the post-Stonewall general]on and freshly re-released on DVD. Ganoung's Michael doesn't exhibit any of the isolation of Band's Michael: In fact, he's juggling a tangle of emotional connections involving his boyfriend, Robert (John Bolger); his first have affection for the AIDS-stricken Nick (Steve Buscemi); and his gal pal Joan (Kathy Kinney). "Bill's focus was always onward friendship," continues Ganoung, who went upon to play the wiser, older man in 1998's Billy's Hollywood cloak Kiss. "And, in fact, we all became fit friends. Even to this day, admitting we're all in different circles, we still restrain in touch."

The times may change, however gay buddy movies keep depicting the lies that bind, decade after decade: The 1993 miniseries Tales of the City, based forward the Arm]stead Maupin novel, captured the polymorphously snarling zeitgeist of '70s San Francisco, with the gloriously transsexual Anna Madrigal presiding above a rainbow family of mixed sexual orientations; 1990's Longtime Companion bore witness to the toll of AIDS forward a Fire Island circle of friends in the '80 while 1996's It's My Party paid similar tribute to a West Coast clan; and Terrence McNally's play and 1997 feature Love! Valour! Compassion! updated Band's formula to the '90s--Buzz his musical-quoting queen (played onstage by dint of Nathan Lane, on film by way of Jason Alexander) seemed a direct descending of Band's Emory.

"Some the public have been gracious enough to acknowledge [their due to The Boys in the Band]--Terrence, for example, has personally talked to me about it," says Crowley who's written a recent yet-unproduced play, The Men From the lads which looks in on many of the same friends 30 years later. "But I've also felt ripped not on by cheap things like Party"--a gay nudie play that might as well have been called The lads in the Buff--"I was right nearest door to a lawsuit about that undivided but figured, Why bother?"

Understandably, young gay filmmakers, eager to define their have a title to generation, find themselves talking back to Crowley's play. "I watched striplings in the Band when I first came disclosed but I found it sort of terrifying," says Greg Berlanti, who wrote and directed The severed Hearts Club. "I recognize that in broke marvelous just discovered ground at the time, cot I still find in an angry film. And a accident of the subsequent movies about gay friends just didn't speak to me" Still, in capturing his hold experience, Berlanti found himself gravitating toward now another group portrait of a light-knit circle of friends: "I knew I wanted to display a group of friends, where individual character is trying to break away and common character is just entering the dispose Some of the characters are autobiographical--I had an on-again, off-again [romance] like the Howie character myself, nevertheless I really borrowed the design and configuration from movies about straight friends like Parenthood, Breaking Away, Diner, and Hannah and Her Sisters."