The Moviegoer The Boys in the Band opens at the Astor today

"THE BOYS IN THE BAND...is not a musical." says the ad for the film version of Mart Crowley's 1967 off Broadway play about homosexuals. That, of course is true right now, but I wouldn't be surprised it a musical Boys did turn up a few years hence. Crowley's work as a play has already done more to legitimize homosexuality as a topic for popular culture than anything else before it. As a movie, it will help open up such remaining bastions of heterosexual chauvinism as pop music and the musical theatre to candid expression by homosexual artists.

It's about time this happened, and this particular process of liberalizing our media couldn't have started with a better work. The Boys in the Band neither apologizes for the homosexual nor preaches about his plight in a heterosexual world. Rather, it sucks us into a grimly realistic slice of the characters lives to let us draw our own conclusions.

Band is about (in the words of one character) "six tired screaming fairy queens and one anxious queer" at a birthday party. Michael, the party's huts, is 30-ish, charming and witty. In the early moments of the film, we find him talking to his friend Donald about their respective analysts, over-loving mothers and financial blues. Gradually they reveal the defense mechanisms that help them survive in a world where "failure is the only thing with which [they] feel at home." For Donald, the only escape is to read book after book. Michael, worried about getting old, stays alive with the help of self-deprecating wisecracks ("Well, one thing you can say about masturbation...you certainly don't have to look your best"), new, expensive clothes and plane tickets to faraway places he can't afford.

While they wait for the others to arrive, a hitch develops in the evening's party plans. Alan, a straight friend from Michael's college days, calls up and insists on coming over. Alan does not know that his old school chum is a homosexual, and Michael does not particularly want Alan to be confronted with this piece of news now. (As he says, "Alan looks down on people in the theatre -so what you think he'll feel about this freak show I've got booked for dinner?")

When Alan refuses to be put off, Michael can do nothing except hope that his straight friend will have come and gone before the rest of the "boys" arrive. But some of the party guests beat Alan to the scene: Hank, an Ivy-League looking math teacher and his lover, fashion photographer Larry; Bernard, a cool black; Emory, a prissy, swishy interior decorator. By the time Harold (the birthday boy), Cowboy (a hustler given to Harold for the night as a present) and Alan appear, the flow of liquor and grass has locked all those present into a violent orgy of sadistic-masochistic emotional destruction; no one may leave until he touches the bottom of his soul and accepts what he finds there.

THE central feature of this devastating carnival is a game devised by Michael in which each person places a phone call to the one person "he has truly loved." As the characters take their turns. they simultaneously expose secret reserves of despair almost unbearable to watch.

Michael, perhaps the most "anxious queer" of them all, uses the game as a device to make all the others share in the self-hatred he feels at being a homosexual. While he hopes that "not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story." he cannot escape his conviction that misery is all he will ever know ("Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse.") He places his final hopes on the possibility that even seemingly straight Alan is in reality a "closet queer," unhappy like himself. In the game and in the film, it is Alan's phone call that provides the final shock in a series of shattering revelations.

As illusion after illusion is stripped away during the party. Crowley manages to destroy virtually all popular conceptions of the homosexual personality and existence. If we cannot entirely identify with the film's world of boundless sorrow and lacerating wit, we cannot turn our backs either. As one character says to Alan. "It's like watching an accident on the highway. You can't look at it and you can't look away."

The play loses very little in transition from stage to screen-and often gains a great deal. Director William Freidkin ( The Night They Reided Minsky's and The Birthday Party ) has wisely chosen to "open up" the play very little. What scenes there are outside of Michael's claustrophobic east Sixties apartment work well with Crowley's conception. And Friedkin's superb eye for seine detail and character groupings greatly augment the power of the screenplay.

THE director's influence is sufficiently strong in the picture that the focus of Boys as a film is radically different from that of Boys as a play, despite the fact that the script remains virtually unchanged. On stage, the center of attention throughout was Michael, and since he is the least happy and most destructive of the group, he set the tone of evening. As a result, homosexual critics (and the Mattachine society) jumped on Crowley for playing up the self-hating homosexual at the expense of the happy, well-adjusted one. In the movie, the camera works to enlarge our vision, forcing us to pay almost as much attention to the other, happier characters as we do to Michael. The sanity of Larry and Hank's relationship gains in impact, as does the characterization of the feminine Emory, who emerges as an exceedingly generous and self-aware human being.

Throughout the film is strengthened by the work of the cast, all of whom played their roles in the original off-Broadway production. These are all great character actors, but particularly outstanding are Cliff Gorman's Emory and Leonard Frey's incredible Harold, "the pock-marked Jewish fairy" birthday boy; Mr. Frey does more with a phrase like "Turning on" than you could possibly imagine.

Frey even runs away with the film at times-although he is the last character to be introduced, not appearing until about an hour of the picture has elapsed. At one point he tells us (in a voice that could not only curdle blood but the contents of one's stomach as well) that "life is a goddamn laugh riot." He goes on, simpering now, "Life... you remember life," he says. We do, of course, and the power of The Boys in the Band is its ability to make us see that homosexuals, like everyone else, are victims of that very same disease.