Seeking to understand the highly unfavorable conditions for the development of gay male theater in Sweden, this essay engages in a historical study of the national opening of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band at Malmö City Theatre in 1970. Propelled by a Foucauldian-inspired theoretical approach, it identifies the subtle, yet highly effective, measures of control that the, at the time, social democratic welfare state exercised over representations of homosexuality on stage. State representatives, who complied with the official political and medical doctrine that homosexuality was a mental illness and posed a potential threat to social stability, interfered at various levels of the production, including the rehearsal process and post-performance talks between cast members and audiences. This alliance between Swedish theaters and members of the medical, psychological, and sexological professions constituted a medico-artistic complicity that supervised and regulated early attempts of gay representation on stage.
Keywords: Biopolitics; Mart Crowley; Swedish welfare state; gay theater; heterosexual representations of homosexuality.