While I liked “Significant Other” and “Bright Colors” much more than “A Life,” I certainly never felt like I was watching an outmoded cliché in these plays. They depicted their characters’ predicaments with frankness and honesty. More important, the context has radically changed since “The Boys in the Band” opened. (Those reviews, by the way, can make for queasy-making reading: “Neither obscene nor disgusting,” remarked The Chicago Daily News, almost in a tone of surprise. “A funny, sad and honest play about a set of mixed-up human beings who happen to be deviates,” opined Time magazine.)

Portraits of gay life in mainstream culture are no longer rare; they have been proliferating for decades. As a result, no one play (or movie) bears the burden of either seeming to affirm, or attempting to negate, stereotype. You might argue that it’s a sign of progress that these writers felt no compunction in writing about troubled, lonely gay characters. Nobody seeing any of these plays today would come away assuming it represented the sum total of gay men’s experience.

The opening up of gay culture to the world over the past 50 years, and the gradual but now solidified acknowledgment of homosexuality as not a chosen “lifestyle,” has been reflected in innumerable plays and movies. A play about gay men’s relationships is no more seen as an “issue” play than one about straight people’s relationships.

In fact, if anything, plays depicting gay life have recently spawned their own version of the “issue” play: specifically the challenges inherent in becoming parents, as in the recent plays “Dada Woof Papa Hot” and the more overtly comic “Steve,” both of which explore how the freedom to marry and the ability to raise children have complicated the liberations (and, in some ways, the indulgences) that some gay men once took for granted. (The occasional straying from monogamy being one of the indulgences.)