Mart Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1935. His early life was deeply rooted in the Catholic Church: he attended a Catholic high school and then went to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1957. His family life was turbulent, with his father drinking heavily and his mother a hypochondriac who used drugs. Still, as Crowley told Ieva Augstums of The Daily Nebraskan in 1998, in one of his rare interviews, "As for my parents, well, they were supportive knowing that they had a weird kid." In the early 1960s, he moved to Hollywood to work as a set designer and worked at several production companies. Eventually, from 1964 to 1966, he was a secretary for the actress Natalie Wood. It was during this time that he began writing The Boys in the Band.

The play was produced in New York in 1968 and proved to...