In preparing for this conversation, I’ve realized that I have never really sought out gay-themed theater or film or TV, which may be because of my own issues or shame. I was interested in aversion, not identification and certainly not celebration. Maybe that’s because when I was growing up, gayness, for me at least, was fundamentally mixed up with AIDS. I wasn’t, certainly not in my teens, really able to extricate my sense of homosexuality from the specter of the epidemic. It loomed large even while I was watching “Boys,” which was written more than a decade before the first diagnoses: Right at the beginning, when an offstage character is described as having canceled an appointment because of “a virus or something,” I heard these chords of doom.

SCHNEIER It was almost a shock to see a play that predates the AIDS epidemic, that didn’t have to grapple with it. (When characters tease one another about lingering in bathhouses, I thought, “Uh oh, I know where this is going.”) I wonder if in some ways the need to respond to the AIDS crisis helped to mobilize and alchemize some of the loathing that “Boys” reveals and, in a weird way, revels in, toward more productive ends. You may not be able to eradicate it entirely, but you can turn its firepower toward more deserving targets: A terrible disease and a Reagan-era world murderously slow on the uptake.

WESLEY MORRIS The completist part of me was curious to see “Boys in the Band” in the context of the gay cultural artifacts that have come back. We’re currently drowning in the return of the return of the gay past: this show; a mostly galvanic “Angels in America”; last year’s electric “Falsettos” revival; “Pose” on FX, which is set in the ball scene of the late 1980s; “Torch Song Trilogy”; the return of “Buddies,” Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s talky, mostly forgotten AIDS friendship dramedy from 1985; and whatever this revivified “Will & Grace” is supposed to be. There’s also the aggravating nostalgia of “Love, Simon,” a limp romantic-comedy only nominally set in the 21st century.

These are very different works, but lumped together, I do wonder whether we’re interrogating the past or luxuriating in it, hiding from the present or reframing it. Zachary Quinto’s daring decision to play the part of Harold in “Boys” as Nosferatu makes sense. He’s the birthday boy. He’s also powerfully undead.

WOOLFE I think Matthew’s right in saying the play revels in self-loathing. The extravagance and explicitness of the self-hatred on display bring it ever closer to self-love. In a way, the play is a utopian fantasy of a wholly gay little world (with the insertion of one terrified, maybe-probably-closeted straight man as the exception that proves the rule) at the final moment before that world was — finally, necessarily, violently — merged with the mainstream. I wasn’t left feeling like it was all that bitter; in a lot of ways, and perhaps this is looking back on the pre-AIDS era, it felt wishful and kind of sweet. And poignant: You can’t help but consider which of these characters will be dead in 20 years.

SCHNEIER I disagree here. I think the characters love their own eloquence — they cast their sparring explicitly as a battle of wits — but I think the toxicity of it is very real, and I felt for them while wanting to get out of their purgatorial apartment as fast as I could. The play does offer the consolation that these wounded souls have each other, and they pair off in ways — romantic, platonic — that I think we’re meant to understand sustain them. Even viperous best friends Michael and Harold: “Call you tomorrow,” Harold says as he exits, and we know he will. But it feels like a punishment as much as a balm. With friends like these …