On 14 April 1968 Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band opened Off-Broadway at Theatre Four on West 55th Street. It was the first successfully produced American play that openly and unapologetically portrayed gay characters and gay lifestyles. Clive Barnes, writing for The New York Times (15 April 1968), said it "is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual milieu, the homosexual way of life, totally for granted and uses it as a valid basis for human experience." Prior to the production of The Boys in the Band, plays that addressed homosexuality did so by incorporating the incidental gay character functioning on the periphery of society, by making homosexuality the "big surprise in the third act," or, as Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his landmark New York Times editorial "Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises" (23 January 1966), by disguising homosexuality under the auspices of heterosexual relationships (as portrayed in...