Naked Boys Singing, the Cats of gay theater, is celebrating its 400th year off-Broadway. I’m proud to have had a hand in the show, although a hand was really not what I had hoped to put in. NBS, as the director is fond of calling it (this makes it sound more like an all-news network than an all-nude musical), was an act of desperation, put together by the leadership of a gay Hollywood theater company who found that audiences wouldn’t go to see a gay show unless they knew there would be some gay or straight or alive and breathing flesh to look at. Serious multiethnic cries for understanding just didn’t draw without a really big hanging garden of forbidden fruit.

So the show’s creator and director, Robert Schrock, said, Let’s meet the enemy head on, and I mean that literally. Naked Boys Singing–the title said it all. And the audiences fought each other to get in. Many years later naked boys are still unveiling themselves nightly on stages in cities around the world.

Among the many strange phenomena that have followed is the acceptance of NBS as a girls’-night-out, Chippendales sort of thing, although none of that kind of business occurs in the show. It’s a bunch of gay guys in mostly gay situations, including a love affair and, in its first production at least, a song about endless testing in a hospital. The fact that NBS is basically a gay show hasn’t seemed to hurt it with a straight audience.