Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, McNally acquired his love for theater early, listening to opera and radio dramas to escape childhood loneliness.  He moved to New York to attend Columbia University in the late 1950s, and had his first play produced on Broadway in 1964, at the age of twenty-five.

From this very first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night,  to the Outer Critics Circle Best Musical winning A Man Of No Importance, McNally has been unapologetically committed to representing gay lives on stage.  With successful works like The Ritz (1974), The Lisbon Traviata (1985), and Love! Valour! Compassion! –   McNally has created some of the most memorable gay characters in theater.

Such commitment has not come without a price for the writer, who has endured controversy throughout his career.  Most notable is the reaction to Corpus Christi, McNally’s 1997 play that recasts the figures of Jesus and his disciples as contemporary gay men.  The Manhattan Theater Club cancelled staging of the play until several other prominent playwrights threatened to pull their own work from the venue.  In London, reaction was even more severe, as the British Muslim group Defenders of the Messenger Jesus issued a Fatwa against McNally, calling for the writer’s execution because of his portrayal of Jesus as gay.

With his thematic focus spanning the intensely personal to the broadly social, McNally was also among the earliest American dramatic writers to respond to the AIDS epidemic in his work.  In 1990, he won an Emmy for scripting the television film Andre’s Mother, in which a woman finally comes to terms with her son’s sexuality at his funeral.  In 1991, he returned to the stage with Lips Together, Teeth Apart, exploring heterosexual fears of HIV through the story of two vacationing straight couples reluctant to swim in a pool once used by a man who died of AIDS.  The Lisbon Traviata, A Pefect Ganesh (1993) and Love! Valour! Compassion! all address the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community, while at the same time exploring McNally’s most consistent themes -  the importance and difficulty of finding love and human connection, and the power of the arts to bring people together across differences.

McNally’s career has spanned more than four decades and has seen him create roles for some of theater’s best-loved talents, including Nathan Lane, Kathy Bates, F. Murray Abraham, Robert Drivas, Zoe Caldwell, John Glover, Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli.  And he shows no signs of slowing down, with revivals of older plays (The Ritz opens on Broadway on October 11th of this year) and new work, including the recent Deuce (2007), starring acting legends Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes, appearing on stages from Broadway to Boston and beyond.

McNally has professed an autobiographical element in much of his work, and this personal investment continues in recent plays.  In Some Men (2006), for instance, he chronicles a near century of gay life with a particular focus on the evolving struggle for equal marriage rights, a struggle close to his heart. McNally and his partner, public-interest lawyer Thomas Kirdahy, obtained a Vermont civil union in 2003 (the New York couple’s ceremony was profiled in the Times) and the couple has been active in the marriage rights movement.

Says McNally: “In Corpus Christi, the lead character Joshua performs a marriage between two men.  Homophobic zealots tried to shut the play down but the message of love and commitment won the day, just as GLAD is winning the day for marriage equality.  I am deeply grateful that GLAD is turning this theatrical imagining into a legal reality.” 

GLAD is thrilled to present Terrence McNally with this year’s Spirit of Justice Award in recognition of all he’s done through his art to increase the visibility of LGBT lives in mainstream America, and to challenge irrational fears often held against those living with HIV/AIDS.