In the following essay, Scheie discusses the controversy over the representation of gay identity in the play The Boys in the Band, calling into question what it means to be a "gay spectator in the 1990s" while assessing various audience reactions to the play over time.

"Bellwether," "watershed," "crossroads," "turning point": with these and other ponderous terms, critics have hailed Mart Crowley's 1968 The Boys in the Band as the breakthrough production that brought frank and direct representations of homosexuality to American theatre. Where earlier plays had disposed of their "deviant" characters in a denouement that was often tantamount to a cleansing of the homosexual taint, spectators of The Boys in the Band witnessed for the first time a group of men discussing their sex lives, dancing together, kissing, and even having sex on a mainstream stage. The play takes the spectator to an exclusively gay birthday party...