Word: gay
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Falling in love with Yuichi is like falling in love with cruelty. But Author Mishima's world is rich in nothing if not masochists, male as well as female. For while he is at it. Yuichi gives just as bad a time to his gay boy friends, who range up the scale from waiter to automobile manufacturer...
...every ten families live below the poverty line, 37% of the households own washing machines, 48% own cars, and 52% own television sets. In the Los Angeles district of Watts, California's most notorious Slough of Despond, the orderly rows of one-story, stucco houses reflect the sun in gay pastels, and only the weed-grown gaps between stores along the wide main streets?"instant parking lots"?hint at the volcanic mob fury that three years ago erupted out of poverty to take 34 lives and destroy $40 million worth of property...
This language is the medium through which Grace Paley builds personality. It provides a salty, descriptive surface for otherwise callow characters such as the novice nymphet in bed with a soldier in A Woman, Young and Old, or the gay but rusting blade of The Contest who thinks he can do without marriage. For the book's best and most typical characters-spunky, passionate women, abandoned by men and saddled with children and poverty-life is a form of coping with the mysteries of love and loneliness...
...theater, as in today's urban society, homosexuals have abandoned discretion and invisibility. For better or worse, homosexuality and the gay-life subculture are becoming acceptable as dramatic themes, to be treated with the same frankness as heterosexual relations. Probably the most overt example of this trend is The Boys in the Band, which opened off-Broadway last week. Neither patronizing nor proselytizing, it coolly takes the milieu of the homosexual for granted. It is also a funny, sad and honest play about a set of mixed-up human beings who happen to be deviates...
Beneath the bitchy, lancing wit of the verbal byplay, Playwright Mart Crowley keeps a dead-level eye on the desolating aspects of homosexual life. He records the loveless, brief encounters, the guilt-ridden, blackout reliance on alcohol, the endless courtship rat race of the gay bars with its inevitable quota of rejection, humiliation and loneliness. Crowley underscores the fact that while the homosexual may pose as a bacchanal of nonconformist pagan delights, he frequently drinks a hemlock-bitter cup of despair...