In the Life: Ep. 1811, "Coming Together"

[Host Michael Billy] Coming up on "In The Life"... a look at the origins of gay theater... [Marshall Mason] The Caffe Cino was a place where people could come and be themselves. [Billy] ...a conversation with Edmund White and Doric Wilson... [Doric Wilson] With Stonewall we started coming out in the daylight. [Edmund White] Not twilight people anymore. [Billy]...and remembering the "Boys In The Band"... [Crayton Robey] What this piece of work did was that it created a dialogue about homosexuality. [Billy]...all this and more on "In The Life." [Narrator] "In The Life" is funded in part by the H. Van Ameringen Foundation... Arcus Foundation... Newpol Foundation... The Estate of Richard W. Weiland... and by the annual support of "In The Life" members like you. [Billy] Welcome to "In The Life." I'm Michael Billy. The days and months following Stonewall galvanized a movement for LGBT Civil Rights but the expression of LGBT art and culture has always existed and inspired people. Tonight, we reflect on the role art and culture plays in shaping our communities movement. ["In The Life" main title music]. Art has always been a means for people to express and dramatize their lives- the way they are and the way they want them to be. In the late 1950s and early '60s Greenwich Village was a haven for outcasts and artists seeking self expression. It was during this vibrant period that gay theater was born at fabulous and virtually hidden little places, like Caffe Cino. [Sound of wind chimes]. [Robert Patrick] The Cino was a religion... a philosophy... a community, a school, a monastery and it was building a culture. [Billy] In the late 1940s, Joe Cino left Buffalo for New York City's Greenwich Village. He dreamed of owning a coffee shop where friends could hang out and have poetry readings. After years of saving, the Caffe Cino opened at 31 Cornelia Street in 1958. The main attraction, at first, was the coffee and conversation. But once a tiny stage of loosely strung together milk crates was set in the room burgeoning artists, many of them gay, began to flock to the cafe and a one-of-a-kind theater was born. [Patrick] The Cino was the first off-off Broadway theater and now people calling it the first gay theater and I think they're quite right in both cases. [1960s pop music playing.] [Marshall Mason] The Caffe Cino was a place where people could come and be themselves and be comfortable with whatever the sexuality was. [Classical music playing]. [Patrick] Before the Cino, the gay characters we knew about were either uh...uh... villainous lesbians preying on girls in vampire movies, or silly...silly hat designers and choreographers. [Claris Nelson] There was no gay movement at the time. We're talking, you know, way before Stonewall. [Billy] For the first time ever there was a place for writers and artists to battle these blatant stereotypes. Spurred on by the Caffe's openly gay and fiercely charismatic owner. [Patrick] It was a fairyland atmosphere and in the depths of fairyland behind the steaming coffee machine, you know, was Joe Cino. What released us at the Cino was Joe. [William Hoffman] How did Joe create that atmosphere... he was a free spirit. [Robert Heide] For Joe, the doors were always open- "do your own thing, do what you have to do, do what you want to do." [Opera music playing]. [Billy] Joe was the heart and soul of the Caffe. Encouraging anyone who entered its doors to let their creativity flow as freely as the coffee... whether they had ever thought of doing theater or not. [Patrick] I've always said if Joe ran a bowling alley, we all would have been champion bowlers. It happened that he ran a theater. So we wrote plays. [Lanford Wilson] The incredible freedom of being able to be...your...self in that place and outside that place and in your work. [Hoffman] Everybody who came there had been suppressing some part of themselves, some vital creative part of themselves which they could express at the Caffe Cino. [Lanford Wilson] You just do anything and it made me want to just experiment like crazy. [Mason] Joe was very liberal. It was just, you know, anything that you felt good about you just had come put it on. [Doric Wilson] I would offer my script to Joe and Joe said, "What's your sign?" And I said, "I don't know." And he's "when were born?" I said, "February 24th." He said uh..."January 17." I said, "No, no February 24th." He said, "No, January 17th. That's when your show opens." [Patrick] And he started each show by hitting the wind chimes and bells and then announce the show. [Actor speaking in Italian accent] "Ladies and a gentlemen, welcome a to 'magica' time at a the Caffe a Cino." [Sound of wind chimes]. [Actor speaking] "The action of the play takes place in the part of paradise commonly called the 'Garden District.' The time is after Adams usual afternoon nap." [Sound of audience clapping]. [Mason] Lots of wonderful theater was created, you know, in between coffees and sandwich makings. [Patrick] What made the Cino new, what created off-off Broadway was its permanency. It wasn't just some kids hiring a loft one night to do an experimental show. Every bloody week of the year you could come here and see experimental theater, which we were doing for free. We don't care if anybody pays to see it. We got to write it and produce it. Joe Cino often said, "Play it for the walls if no one was there." I don't think I ever did better work. [Billy] Seminal works from the theaters next wave of playwrights, actors and directors began pouring out of Caffe Cino and garnering both critical and popular attention. [Patrick] John Guare and Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson with the "Madness of Lady Bright", Bob Dahdah who did "Dames At Sea"- a wonderful musical that introduced Bernadette Peters. Tom Eyen...it took Tom 20 years to free himself of the seductive freedom of off-off Broadway and write "Dreamgirls." [Music from "Dreamgirls"]. [Billy] What had begun as fun and experimentation for the mostly gay artists quickly grew into something more socially relevant. [Hoffman] Caffe Cino was different from other places for gay people in that... for one thing, in those days there weren't too many places that gay people could write for... honestly. Two, it wasn't doctrinaire. It isn't like it...it...it had a kind of agenda about being gay. [Patrick] When I was acting in my first play. "The Haunted Host," we acted right among the tables, you know, and I leaned on the customers table and there was a young man sitting at the table with an older man and woman and as I leaned there he said, "You see him, mom?" "You see him, dad? That's why I brought you here. I wanted you to see him. I'm like him. I'm a homosexual." [Mason] We were, I think, somewhat aware that we were...revolutionary. [Helen Hanft] We were doing something that nobody else did. That nobody else could...could do, really. Or could put up with. [Billy] But by the end of 1966 the success that the Caffe had reached created a frenetic pace that was clearly taking its toll on Joe. [Nelson] I think there was always a show up. Doing two shows or three shows a night if you'd believe it on the Friday and Saturday was three shows a night. The last one was one o'clock in the morning. [Billy] At the same time the drug scene of the '60s encroached and things began to fall apart. [Patrick] People came in and brought speed... and people got very crazy and hooked and sick. People were getting physically and mentally ill. [Hoffman] The very "wildness" of...of the Cino was its undoing. [1960s pop music playing]. [Billy] In January of 1967 Joe's longtime lover, Jonathan Torrey, died tragically pushing Cino over the edge. On the morning of March 30th that year, Joe was found by a friend on the floor of the Caffe Cino bleeding to death from drug induced and self inflicted wounds. He was rushed to the hospital. [Wilson] He shouldn't have made it to the hospital. He lived for three or four days. There was a most amazing line to give blood. [Patrick] When they told me on the phone that Joe is dead, I was suddenly up in the air watching myself. [Nelson?] A lot of people were completely and totally devastated and didn't come in the Caffe again because the memory is just more than they could handle. [Hoffman] I think the heart of the place left, when Joe Cino committed suicide. [Billy] Without Joe, the Cino continued on with the help of friends until 1968 when it fell victim to the fines from cabaret license laws that were now being more rigidly enforced on Greenwich Village coffee houses. But even after it closed its doors, the Caffe Cino's influence on theater was immense. [Magie Dominic] We're here at the Lincoln Center Research Library for the Performing Arts in New York City. In the Billy Rose Collection, there's an incredible documentation of the Cino years. [Dominic] "It's Joe." [Dominic] These are the actual original posters that were in the Caffe window, these are scripts, but this is part of the fabulous collection that's here. We can't recreate the past. The past is gone. But we can carry the traditions forward. [Patrick] Pretend he's not there, he'll go away. Oh, here's Caffe Cino. Joe used to live behind there. [Doric Wilson] I want to welcome you back. Here you are. [Patrick, Doric Wilson and Lanford Wilson laughing]. [Wilson] I couldn't carry a bigger pot... [Patrick] Okay... [Patrick sighs]. [Hoffman] It was an experience that bonded us probably forever. [Room noise, people laughing and talking]. [Doric Wilson] The wall back there for the kitchen is where the old counter used to be to make the cappuccino. It's amazing how it stayed with me. By 1974 I had a theater based on the Cino that was called TOSOS that was doing new gay plays and my whole life has been dedicated to that. [Patrick] It's smaller. They built walls in. [Doric Wilson] Where are [unintelligible]. [Patrick] Because of the Cino there were now 300 off-off Broadway theaters. [Heide] The entire stage in the middle of this room was a bed at one time- a huge bed. [Hoffman] My play, "Good Night, I Love You," was staged in the loft up there and the loft up here and the audience in between. Like, like ping-pong game. [Lanford Wilson] I had no idea that we were the beginning of independent theater in America but we really were. Duh! Who knew? [Mason] Of course, out of Joe Cino's work came the Cafe La Mama and there came a point when I needed to create a theater and we started Circle Rep and we've got to be, you know, kind of a off-Broadway institution. [Patrick] If it wasn't for the Cino the chain of events would not have happened that made it possible for "In The Life." Uh...Harvey Fierstein, Quentin Crisp, uh..."Angels in America," "Dreamgirls," uh..."Fifth of July," "As Is," my play "Kennedy's Children," "Hair"... all of these things are the flower of Cino. [Hoffman] I never would have been a playwright without the Caffe Cino. I never certainly would have written about gay subjects that freely. That was the kind of empowerment that the place gave us- we were no longer victims. [Music from "Dreamgirls"]. ['"In The Life" music playing.] [Billy] Edmund White and Doric Wilson are powerful writers, critics, even old friends. We brought them together to discuss their first hand accounts of the Stonewall riots and how bearing witness to the uprising impacted their work and views of the LGBT experience. [Edmund White] You were active in the very beginning of gay theater... [Doric Wilson] Technically, the first modern gay plays we're done at the Caffe Cino on Cornelia Street. Written by myself, Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick...we never realized what we were doing was brave. Of my four Cino plays, two are gay plays in so much that there were open gay characters. They don't discuss being gay. [White] Uh huh. [Wilson] That's not what the subject matter of the players are. [White] Which play is that? [Wilson] Uh..."Pretty People." There's an "out" character in it that has no, no stereotypes. He just happens to be a very attractive young man and he's gay. [White] You might not have been surprised by it but I think I was that...that openly gay material was being used. [Wilson] Everybody was...we didn't think about it. [White] How did you decide to write about gay subject matter? [Wilson] Actually, how did you? [White] Well, for me, I'm sure it was a lot more tormented than for you. I mean, I think in my case I... I had actually written a gay novel in the '60s which was pretty good and it went to 25 publishers and it was turned down often times by editors who themselves were gay and who years later told me, "You know, I really liked that book of yours but I didn't dare accept it because people would have known I was gay." [Wilson] I don't know that gay liberation per se had any direct response to gay culture. [White] Oh, I think it did. [Wilson] You do? [White] Absolutely it did because, for instance, there were organizations that... see I moved to Rome in 1970 and by the time I came back a year later I was shocked by how different everything was because it was very dramatic for me. And when I...and one of the things that was happening was the Gay Academic Union. Which would have these meetings where people say... [Wilson] Sorry, you're right. I think of the movement I think of the activist movements. [White] Yeah, but there were these intellectual movements and I remember being invited by student organizations to Princeton, to different gay organizations...student ones, that later died out. Gay liberation, originally, first and foremost meant for us sexual liberation. It meant sexual opportunity because what a lot of people forget... is that, is that, is that there were very...it was very hard for a gay and lesbian people to meet each other. [Wilson] I agree with you that it gave sexual freedom but I also think it gave identity. [White] Absolutely. [Wilson] Through all...through education...uh...education programs. [White] And the identity was of a minority group rather than of sickness. [Wilson] Yes, oh yeah. [White] After the World's Fair in '64 or so the mayor was always closing gay bars. [Wilson] He was closing them before the World's Fair. [White] Because he wanted to clean the city out for the World's Fair and the idea was that tourists would be appalled and disgusted if they saw any gay activity... little realizing that many people would come to New York for that. Maybe around '66 or '7 gay bars began to reopen and then there were quite a few of them. And there were a lot...many more visible gay people on the street. [Wilson] Yes and more people were coming "out." [White] Yeah. [Wilson] I arrived in New York "out." I've always been "out." I came "out" in the '50s and at Wheat (?) Ranch High School in Washington State. [White] But it, but it was very rare. [Wilson] I know. [White] Then when all the bars began to reopen everybody thought, "Oh, phew, that horrible period is over and now we're going to be free." And so when the Stonewall was raided and closed I think it really upset people because it seemed like a throwback to... [Wilson] Well also... [White]...a slightly earlier era. [Wilson] In that era when bars were raided they were never raided on the weekend. They were always raided on a slow night because the police, the bar owners had agreements. [White] It wasn't the police raiding it was the ATF who raided because they'd found out that the police were in collusion with the mafia owners. I mean, of course what's famous about Stonewall is that the customers resisted. [Wilson] (Unintelligible)...actually what happened all the customers got out on the sidewalk and the police were trapped inside, not knowing there was no back exit out of the Stonewall. [White] I was there. [Wilson] Oh, I didn't know. Sorry. [White] I was there. No, I was there because I just happened to be walking past. [Wilson] Me too. [White] I wasn't actually in the bar nor did I go to that bar very often. But I was walking past with a friend and of course we were intrigued and we stayed there. And I was so awful and middle class that I kept trying to get everybody to calm down, "Oh, come on guys," you know, but even in spite of myself, in spite of my awful... bourgeois self-hatred, I found myself excited. [Wilson] People weren't angry. First of all, there was astonishment that we were doing it. [White] And, and when we would say things like... slogans like "Gay is Good," patterned after "Black is Beautiful," it struck us as hilarious. [Wilson] Yes, it was a great gleefulness about it. [White] But there was also a feeling that was preposterous because after all it was really at Stonewall, I think, that people, like gay people, first realized that they might be something like a minority group. [Wilson] Yep. [White] Rather than a medical diagnosis because up till then we were sick. [Wilson] Yeah. [White] And there's always some point in the evening where we'd all say, "Oh God, we're sick." And then [Wilson] (Unintelligible) [White] Yeah...right..right and then but, but [Wilson] I never had a problem with it. [White] Well you probably didn't but everybody else... [Wilson] Well, not everybody else did...kind of the world you lived in. [White] Yeah. [Wilson] Most of the people I knew didn't. [White] I was in therapy for years and years trying to go straight. I was engaged twice, you know, the typical middle-class person suffering over the whole thing. And then the wonderful thing about Stonewall for jerks like me it was that it was liberating. [Wilson] Yes. The gay world was in the dark. The term...one of the terms were, at the time, was the "twilight" world. At twilight gays came out from under their rocks or whatever. [White] Sure. [Wilson] And with Stonewall, we started coming out in the daylight. [White] Not twilight people anymore. [Wilson] Not twilight people anymore. [White] Yeah. [Wilson] John Irving wrote you an open letter and I think he mentions in it that the gay marriage phenomenon going on at the moment uh...revitalizes the Movement. [White] Yes. I mean, John irving lives in Vermont. He's straight man. Of course, the great writer of "The World According to Garp" and so many other wonderful books. And he was very active in campaigning for it in Vermont. And it does look as if that is the current "big issue." I mean, for people like me who never liked marriage and also didn't like the idea that gay people should be assimilated to the, to the mainstream community that's now a lost cause and...and...and I've given up on it and what I now see is...is that that, that the marriage issue goes right to where people live. I mean, it's all right to say, "Yes, you gay people can have job security" and "Yes, you gay people can produce your musicals or whatever." But when you want to get married it feels like one of the central institutions of our society and especially when you want to adopt children or have children of your own. [Wilson] It's funny. We don't change, you and I, bottom line. I don't think we do. [White] No? I guess not. Well, we're still here and uh...and it's, it's really been great to see you again. [Wilson] Yes indeed. ["In The Life" music paying]. [Billy] In 1968, Mart Crowley's play "The Boys in the Band" swept both gay and straight theater audiences alike. This controversial work was adapted by Crowley into a 1970s film directed by William Friedkin. Now, in 2009, Crayton Robey's documentary "Making The Boys" examines this seminal work and its place in gay history. [Crayton Robey] My inspiration for "Making the Boys" was just...I just look around today and I... and I see that we have all these freedoms and I feel that people don't really connect the dots. I think that the older generation and the younger generation really don't relate to each other and I think a lot of that happened because the AIDS epidemic, our history is not taught in schools and I uhm... just feel like our legacy should be preserved. [Norm Korpi] I don't know what "Boys in the Band"...is. That's just what a "bad gay"... When you're like, "What's a 'bad gay?" "Bad gay." [Christian Siriano] I haven't really heard of a "Boys in the Band." So I know that's very embarrassing. But uhm...I'm this boy in this band but I don't know otherwise. [Robey] The "Boys in the Band" was a play that was written by Mart Crowley in 1968. [Mart Crowley] It was tried out uh...you know, in a workshop and then it was very cautiously moved to off-Broadway and nobody knew whether it was going to work there or not. [Robey] Within a year it had opened nationally and internationally and this is all before Stonewall happened. Which is so amazing. And what this piece of work did, because it was reviewed in the papers, it created a dialogue about homosexuality. Within that same year he was approached by a couple different studios and uh... it was made into a major feature film. [Michael Musto] I heard about "Boys in the Band" when I was probably in my early teens. So I was too young to actually go and see it but it had caused quite a scandal as an "out" gay film. This was the life I couldn't even dream about at this point because, though I knew I was gay, I didn't know there was a future for me. [Robey] At that particular time you go see the play but then you go out for a drink that night and you could be arrested. [Unidentified man speaking] There was a period in American history not so long ago, some of us were alive, when gay people were virtually invisible. [Musto] In the '60s gays were evil, they were nasty, they were twisted and psychotic or they were pathetic. There was no middle ground. [Crowley] I didn't know what I was gonna write about. But, you know, what does one write about? One writes about what one knows and that's one's life. [Robey] What the "Boys in the Band" does it just documents that moment in history and that group of people that assembled at that birthday party and that were just dealing with their demons or not. [Crowley] When I thought I had to do something and I started to work on the play, it was just reaching for a legal pad out of my briefcase and, you know, beginning to scribble some notes on a yellow legal pad and day-by-day, you know, they kept growing and the pile... got thicker and thicker. [Robey] From a historical perspective, we have to say that it was the most significant and the most important gay play in terms of like just advancing our causes because of the visibility that it gave us. People have their own personal experiences with the piece. Seeing these gay images of themselves was so important but I think it's also overshadowed by the Movement that had started, the gay liberation movement, were people... they could not really like these particular characters because they had to celebrate their freedom. [Charles Kaiser] There were a lot of future gay activists sitting in the audience who were being imbued with the idea that this is something that we should be open about and proud of uh...you know, I say in "The Gay Metropolis" that the last speech, which most people thought was very self-hating... [Dialogue from the film "Boys in the Band"] "But you'll always be homosexual as well." "Always, Michael. "Always." "Until the day you die." [Kaiser] And in fact...that was a very liberating statement because that was finally an acknowledgement that this condition was not a choice, or something that you could get over. This was who you were. [Robey] I like to call it a classic. I mean, it's something that we have...we have as a culture and...and uh...it came around at a moment and just rescued us in...in a very, very special way. [Billy] Thank you for watching "In The Life." To learn more about the issues and tonight's stories and how they affect you visit our website at inthelifetv.org. You can also watch extended interviews, sign up for monthly air date alerts, and download past episodes 24-7. I'm Michael Billy. Thanks for tuning in and please join us next month. [Folk protest song playing under end credits] "Where were you in the June of '69?" "Did you sing a song Suzanne? Sweet Caroline?" "Did you walk on the board with both feet on the ground? "Were you Woodstock bound?" "Those were the days when the bars became our home." "Because we had no church or state to call our home." "In The Life" is funded in part by the H. van Ameringen Foundation... Arcus Foundation... Newpol Foundation... The Estate of Richard W. Weiland... and by the annual support of "In The Life" members like you. [WNET Channel 13 New York station identification music]. [American Public Television station identification music].