Quick Facts
Biography
John Glines (born October 11, 1933 in Santa Maria, California) is an American playwright and producer.
Playwright and producer
Glines graduated from Yale in 1955 with a BA in drama. As a writer in children’s television, he worked for seven years on Captain Kangaroo and for four years on Sesame Street. His play In The Desert Of My Soul was anthologized in Best Short Plays Of 1976. His musical Gulp!, written with Stephen Greco and Robin Jones, had a lengthy off-off-Broadway run in 1977.
His plays written for, and originally produced by The Glines, the non-profit organization for gay arts which he co-founded in 1976 with Barry Laine and Jerry Tobin, include On Tina Tuna Walk , In Her Own Words (A Biography of Jane Chambers), Men Of Manhattan (also made into a film directed by Anthony Marsellis), Chicken Delight , Body And Soul Murder In Disguise, Key West, and Heavenly Days. His last play, Butterflies And Tigers, based on stories of the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution, had an extended run in New York City in 1998.
Glines won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award in 1983 as producer of Torch Song Trilogy. In his acceptance speech for the Tony, he was the first person ever to acknowledge his same-sex lover on a major awards show
. He won the Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination in 1985 as producer of As Is, and won the Drama Desk Award in 1994 for Whoop-Dee-Doo!
Activism
Concurrently with his theatre work, Glines was a founding trustee of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, which grew out of Stamp Out AIDS, the non-profit organization he founded in 1985 as a result of his work on As Is.
Glines has been honored by numerous organizations, including the Empire State Pride Agenda (Artistic Vision Award), Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) (Oscar Wilde Award), the Allied Gay and Lesbian Association of Los Angeles, and Off-Off-Broadway Review (Lifetime Achievement Award).