Playwright

Playwright

b. August 21, 1935
d. March 7, 2020

“I had no agenda in writing this play except expressing myself.”

Mart Crowley was a gay American playwright famous for “The Boys in the Band” (1968), a groundbreaking play that shocked mainstream audiences with its open, unapologetic portrayal of gay life.

The son of an alcoholic father and a drug-abusing mother, Edward Martino “Mart” Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He attended an all-boys Roman Catholic high school and studied theater at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1957 and moved to New York City.

In New York, Crowley worked as a personal assistant for the film director Elia Kazan. He later worked for the actress Natalie Wood, who encouraged Crowley to write.

Inspired by a controversial article titled “Homosexual Drama And Its Disguises” by Stanley Kauffman, a theater critic for The New York Times, Crowley penned his first play, “The Boys in the Band.” About the gathering of gay men for a birthday party, it premiered Off Broadway more than a year before the Stonewall riots, at a time when homosexuality was marginalized and vilified.

“The Boys in the Band” ran for more than two years and a thousand performances, attracting both gay and straight theatergoers. Patrons included prominent figures such as former First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy and New York City Mayor John Lindsay. The play earned praise for its insight and honesty. A film adaptation was released in 1970. As the organized gay rights movement gained momentum, however, “The Boys in the Band” drew criticism for its reinforcement of “unflattering” gay stereotypes.

Crowley wrote and produced five additional plays, including “The Men From the Boys” (2002), a sequel to “The Boys in the Band.” He wrote for television, including the popular ABC mystery series “Hart to Hart,” which he produced. Crowley also appeared in several documentaries.

In 2009 Crowley won a Lambda Literary Award for his collected plays. The same year, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, “The Boys in the Band” was restaged on Broadway. It earned Crowley a 2019 Tony Award for Best Revival. In 2020 Netflix released a cinematic adaptation of the work with many of the same Broadway actors.

Crowley died in New York from complications of heart surgery.

Writer & Producer

b. July 22, 1982

“There are so many more queer stories being told on television, but often we’re still presented with overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male.”

Lauren Morelli is an American screenwriter, producer and director. Her work often depicts lesbian relationships and issues. She is best known for two Netflix series, “Orange Is the New Black” and “Tales of the City.”

Morelli grew up in McCandless, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. At Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, she followed her passion for dance until a back injury forced her to reconsider her career path. She pursued writing but graduated with a BFA in Modern Dance.

After graduation, Morelli moved to Los Angeles. She wrote short stories and blog posts before securing a position as the lead writer for “Orange Is the New Black.” Premiering on Netflix in 2013, the series is an adaptation of Piper Kerman's memoir, “Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison” (2010). The show features lesbian relationships in a low-security women’s federal prison.

Ranked by The Guardian as one of the 100 best TV shows of the 21^st century, “Orange” earned praise for humanizing prisoners and showcasing diversity in body types, racial backgrounds and sexualities. Nominated for 17 Emmys, six Golden Globes and six Writers Guild Awards, it remained the best-watched series on Netflix, three years after it ended.

Morelli worked on the series for five of its seven seasons. Writing for lesbian characters awakened her own latent sexuality. A year into the show, she came out as a lesbian and divorced her husband.

Following the success of “Orange Is the New Black,” Morelli continued to work on lesbian-themed material at Netflix, becoming the executive producer and writer of “Tales of the City” (2019). An adaption of Armistead Maupin’s 1978 books on LGBT romance in San Francisco, the series starred Oscar winners Ellen Page and Laura Linney.

Morelli’s work extends to playwriting. Her short play “Roach & Rat” was produced in 2013 by Lesser America, a theater company in New York City.

In 2017 Morelli married Samira Wiley. The couple has been together since shortly after Morelli came out. In 2019 Diva Magazine, Europe’s leading publication for lesbian and bisexual women, featured Morelli on its cover.

Trailblazing Writer

b. August 26, 1904
d. January 4, 1986

“One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”

Christopher Isherwood is an Anglo-American writer who was among the first to bring gay themes to mainstream literary audiences. Much of his work is semi-autobiographical, including “Goodbye to Berlin,” the novel that inspired the Tony Award-winning musical and Academy Award-winning film “Cabaret.”

Isherwood was born in 1904 near Manchester, England. From an early age, he formed friendships with people from all walks of life, some of whom later became his creative collaborators. In 1924, after submitting joke answers on his second-year exams, Isherwood was asked to leave Cambridge University. Embracing his newfound freedom, he took part-time jobs as the secretary of a string quartet and as a private tutor. He worked on his first novels and briefly attended medical school.

In 1929 Isherwood visited his friend, the poet W.H. Auden, in Berlin. The trip changed his life, bringing him “face to face with his tribe” and beginning his liberation as a gay man. Isherwood moved to Berlin later that year. His experiences and friendships there provided material for his novels “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and “Goodbye to Berlin.” The latter, which depicts Germany’s pre-Nazi decadence, became Isherwood’s most famous work and cemented his legacy. The book was adapted into the play “I Am a Camera” and the musical “Cabaret,” which earned eight Tony Awards. The film version of “Cabaret,” starring Liza Minnelli, won eight Academy Awards.

In Berlin, Isherwood also began a relationship with a young German, Heinz Neddermeyer. The pair fled the Nazis, who were persecuting homosexuals, and moved across Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in 1937.

Isherwood returned to London, where he wrote plays and screenplays, before settling in Hollywood. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946. Seven years later, he fell in love with a college student, Don Bachardy. The couple remained together for more than 30 years, until Isherwood’s death. The relationship became a model for many gay men.

In his later years, Isherwood turned increasingly to autobiographical and gay themes. In 1964 he published the critically acclaimed novel, “A Single Man,” about a gay middle-aged English professor. A film adaptation, directed by Tom Ford and starring Colin Firth, premiered in 2009. It earned international recognition, including an Academy Award nomination for best actor.

In Isherwood’s 1976 memoir, “Christopher and His Kind,” the author renounced his reticence to admit his homosexuality in his earlier work. The memoir speaks candidly about his life in Berlin as a young gay man.

Isherwood died of prostate cancer in Santa Monica, California. He was 81.

Novelist

b. September 11, 1948

“No one of us should feel we can leave someone behind in the struggle for liberation.”

Jewelle Gomez is an author and activist whose writing centers on the experiences of LGBTQ women of color. Her books include the double Lambda Award-winning novel “The Gilda Stories.” Gomez was a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Gomez was raised by her great-grandmother, a woman of African and Native American descent. Gomez attended Northeastern University on a full scholarship. As one of the university’s few black students, she began her lifetime of activism participating in protests over campus inequality. She received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study at Columbia University School of Journalism and worked as a production assistant on “Say Brother,” one of the first black weekly television shows in the United States.

Gomez’s feminist and intersectional activism shapes her creative voice. After several of her poetry collections were published, the first of her many novels, “The Gilda Stories,” was released in 1991. The story, which spans 200 years in the life of Gilda, a vampire who escapes slavery, reframes traditional vampire mythology from a black lesbian feminist perspective. After winning the Lambda Award, Gomez adapted the book into a theatrical production, “Bone and Ash,” which was performed in 13 U.S. cities. More than a hundred anthologies include Gomez’s fiction and poetry, and numerous publications, such as The New York Times, The Village Voice and Essence Magazine, have published her work.

On behalf of LGBTQ rights, Gomez’s activism is “grounded in the history of race and gender in America.” She wrote, “No one of us should feel we can leave someone behind in the struggle for liberation.” From 1985 to 1987, she served as a founding member of GLAAD. She has since served on the boards of numerous women’s and LGBTQ philanthropic and cultural organizations and as a commencement speaker for multiple educational institutions. She and her partner were among the litigants who sued the state of California for the right to legal same-sex marriage, and several of her articles were quoted extensively during the case.

Gomez received a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the California Arts Council. She has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council and the California Arts Council.

She lives in San Francisco with her partner, Dr. Diane Sabin.

Oscar-Winning Screenwriter

b. October 17, 1980

“It’s really important for us, in terms of the storytellers, to be able to talk about these intimate details that built our lives.”

Tarell Alvin McCraney is an award-winning playwright and an actor. In 2017 he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Moonlight,” a film based on his autobiographical play, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.”

McCraney was born in the tough Liberty City section of Miami, Florida, to a teenage mother who struggled with crack addiction. He survived with the help of a kind-hearted drug dealer and his grandparents, who encouraged learning and offered a vision of life outside his crime-infested neighborhood.   

McCraney attended Miami’s New World School of the Arts and was accepted into the Theatre School at DePaul University, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting. At age 24, he enrolled in the playwriting program at Yale School of Drama. Upon graduation he received the prestigious Cole Porter playwriting award. 

At Yale, McCraney wrote his first famous play, “The Brothers Size.” It opened off Broadway in 2007, when he was a third-year student. The New York Times reviewed it enthusiastically.

“The Brothers Size,” and two other plays he wrote in drama school, “In The Red and Brown Water” and “Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet,” make up McCraney’s acclaimed trilogy, “The Brother/Sister Plays.” Set in the Louisiana bayou and drawing upon West African Lore, “The Brother/Sister Plays” distinguished McCraney as a gifted new artist. The trilogy was performed in repertory in the United States and worldwide.

From 2009 to 2011, McCraney served as the Warwick International Playwright in Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. In 2010 he became a member of the celebrated Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. He also performed with the Northlight Theatre and co-starred in the Chicago premiere of “Blue/Orange.” 

In 2013 McCraney received a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “genius grant.” The MacArthur Foundation presents the coveted prize annually to 24 “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals.” 

With the director Barry Jenkins, McCraney co-wrote the screenplay for the 2016 film “Moonlight,” which draws on his experience growing up black and gay in a Miami housing project. The film won three Academy Awards, including  Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, the Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for best picture, and dozens of other awards and nominations.
 
Among other honors, McCraney has received London's Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, The New York Times’ inaugural Outstanding Playwright Award and the renowned Whiting Award. The Advocate named him to its list of “40 under 40” and Out magazine featured him on its “Out100” list.

McCraney is the Chair and Eugene O’Neill Professor in the Practice of Playwriting at Yale University School of Drama and the Playwright-in-Residence of the Yale Repertory Theatre. 

Playwright

b. November 3, 1938
d. March 24, 2020

“I think the theatre teaches us who we are, what our society is, where we are going.”

Terrence McNally is an award-winning American playwright whose career spans five decades. His work, which delves into themes of family, war, sexuality and religion, has earned him four Tony Awards. 

Raised in Texas, McNally moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. His first job was as a tutor for John Steinbeck’s children. During this time, McNally wrote his first play, and Steinbeck asked him to write the libretto for the musical based on his novel “East of Eden.”

McNally spend much of his early career writing and submitting works to theater companies around the country. At the famous Actors Studio, he met the playwright Edward Albee, with whom he became romantically involved. 

McNally’s first play was a flop, but he went on to write several successful off-Broadway shows, including “Witness” and “Sweet Eros.” His breakout, “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” was later adapted into a film starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. Several of McNally’s plays have been adapted for the screen.

McNally’s “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” about two married couples who spend a weekend on Fire Island, is a landmark play about AIDS. McNally also explored gay themes in the book for the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” for which he won his first Tony Award. His play “Love! Valour! Compassion!” earned him another Tony Award for its portrayal of eight gay men facing issues of fidelity, love and happiness. In 1996 McNally was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. 

McNally’s controversial play “Corpus Christi” depicts a modern-day Jesus as a homosexual. The Manhattan Theater Club, the first company to consider staging it, received death threats and temporarily canceled the production before enjoying a successful run. The play continues to spark controversy . 

In 2014 McNally’s play “Mothers and Sons” opened on Broadway. It explores the relationship between a mother and her dead son’s former gay partner. The play revisits McNally’s 1990 television movie, “Andre’s Mother,” for which he won an Emmy Award.

McNally and his partner, Thomas Kirdahy, married in Vermont in 2003 and again in Washington, D.C., in 2010. In 2020 McNally died from complications of the novel coronavirus. His collection of works and notes are held in an open archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Actor and Director

b. April 21, 1963, El Paso, Texas

“Rock and roll and theatre and drag are all the same thing. They’re ways to remind yourself that you’re not alone.”

John Cameron Mitchell is best known for writing, directing and starring in the cult classic film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

While the story of Hedwig is not autobiographical, the sexually ambiguous character—the lead singer in a fictional rock band—does share some traits with her creator. Like Hedwig, who is from East Germany and spent her youth craving the freedom of the West, Mitchell used to visit his military father in Berlin and became haunted by the Berlin wall. Hedwig, like Mitchell, is a performer with an insatiable passion for the stage. Both are perennial outsiders making their own way—idealists who transcend labels. Hedwig confounds male and female identities and Mitchell is an out gay man who believes gays are on the verge of selling out as they assimilate into society. Hedwig and Mitchell teach us to distrust appearances because true character comes from the inside out.

In 2008 Mitchell established a New York nightclub called Mattachine. It was located at Julius, the nation’s oldest known gay bar. Mattachine was an homage to activists who convened at Julius in 1966 to hold a “sip-in” protest of the State Liquor Authority’s regulation prohibiting bartenders from serving homosexuals.

In 1998 Mitchell’s rock musical, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” debuted Off-Broadway and won an Obie Award. Mitchell played the lead role for seven shows a week. In 2001 he directed and starred in the film version, for which he earned the Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor. The film garnered a cult following. In 2014 a revival of “Hedwig” opened on Broadway with Neil Patrick Harris cast in the leading role. Mitchell also wrote, directed and produced the film “Shortbus” and directed “Rabbit Hole,” starring Nicole Kidman.

Poet and Playwright

b.  February 27, 1880, Boston, Massachusetts

d.  June 10, 1958, New York, New York

“I oft have dreamed the bliss
Of the nectar in one kiss.”

Angelina Weld Grimké was a poet, teacher and playwright who helped pave the way for the Harlem Renaissance. Grimké was one of the nation’s first celebrated female African-American authors.

Grimké was born to a prominent biracial couple who divorced soon after her birth. Her mother left when Grimké was a toddler and committed suicide several years later. Grimké had a strained relationship with her father, whose lineage of notable abolitionists set high expectations for his daughter.

Grimké excelled academically, publishing her first poem at age 13. She earned a degree in physical education from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. She moved to Washington, D.C., where she taught while writing poetry in her spare time.

Although Grimké was called to write, she felt pressure to please her father by not publishing anything that could tarnish the family name. What Grimké did publish was highly successful, including her three-act drama, “Rachel,” the first play by a black woman to be staged in a public theater.

Little is known of Grimké’s personal relationships, but her work often alludes to suppressed emotions, and several of her unpublished poems feature explicitly lesbian content. Her diary includes entries about her female lovers.

Although her work was well received, Grimké retreated to solitude for most of her life. After her father’s death in 1930, she never published again.

Author

b. October 31, 1876, Dayton, Ohio

d. February 3, 1972, Paris, France

“Your life is your most beautiful poem; you are your own immortal masterpiece.”

Natalie Clifford Barney, a leading pioneer of feminist literature, was a free spirit whose eccentricity and insatiable desire for life, love and art make her one of the most fascinating women of the 20th century.

Barney’s life in Paris was a far cry from what her wealthy Midwestern parents expected. They assumed she would marry an aristocrat and generally “behave.”

Barney had no interest in marriage or behaving. She studied for 18 months at a boarding school in Fontainebleau, France, that encouraged girls to think for themselves. Her time there began her passion for the French bohemian lifestyle.

Barney took up residency on the Left Bank, in Paris. France gave her the artistic and sexual freedom she craved. She started a famous salon that served as a gathering place for leading artists and intellectuals. In addition to her weekly salon, Barney founded the Académie des Femmes to mentor women writers.

Her expansive catalog of work, written from a lesbian perspective, includes poetry, novels, epigrams and plays.

Paris served as the epicenter of Barney’s irrepressible love life, where her charisma earned her the reputation as a female Casanova. Her many romantic liaisons became the subject not only of her own literary work, but also of the work of other prominent French artists and intellectuals.

At age 24, Barney began an affair with Anglo-American writer Renee Vivien. From a new and feminist perspective, the two wrote prolifically about sex and gender. But Barney’s most notable romance was her 50-year nonmonogamous partnership with painter Romaine Brooks. Barney was Brooks’s muse for some of her famous works.

Natalie Barney vitalized the lesbian literary tradition and served as an inspiration for free spirits by being unapologetically herself.