Speaking Softly in Code: The Queer Perspective in the Works of

Tennessee Williams

The dramatic canon of Tennessee Williams, although extensively analyzed and critiqued,
remains underestimated in respect to its contribution to the gay literature. The playwright’s
commentary on the issues of homosexuality, although cryptic and enigmatic proves to be a
long dismissed but immanent aspect of his creativity.
Williams’s voice in the question of same-sex love was virtually not recognized by the
straight audience until the early 1970s; when the author encouraged by increasingly liberal
moods in America decided to disclose his homosexual orientation publicly. The most prolific
and successful period of his writing career—the 1940s through the 1950s—coincided with the
strongly conservative social and political mores in America, considerably inhibiting the
playwright’s outspokenness. In the eyes of society, influenced by the national propaganda, a
homosexual was a degenerate and a national risk. Consequently, for Williams as an artist, the
times of Cold War Era and McCarthy’s social policy persecuting homosexuals along with
communists obviously imposed restrictions on his literary expression. Since the government
security apparatus at the time possessed the power to degrade any public figure suspected of
homosexuality and preclude them from pursuing their jobs, fearing not merely losing his
audience but ruining his career, the playwright remained to a large degree reserved about the
issues of homosexuality. Nevertheless, even though restricted by the taboo and censorship of
the time, wishing to communicate his thoughts and concerns with the repressed and
victimized gay community, Williams managed to develop a language of ambiguity and
insinuations that was capable of expressing the prohibited matter. While the literary allusions
and references to the gay subculture were inconspicuous for the mainstream audience, and
ignored or simply disapproved of as inappropriate by the critics and scholars of the time, the
recent reexaminations of Williams’s dramatic canon allow one to observe that the playwright
virtually designed a code by means of which to smuggle homoeroticism into his dramatic
output. What I will try to argue in this paper is that the playwright does speak for the socially
discriminated homosexual minority in a camouflaged way; applying submerged homosexual
plots, recurrent motifs, symbols and intertextuality, as well as proposing character and stage
presentation techniques that remain opaque to the majority of the spectators but are
meaningful to the few initiated ones. I will point to Williams’ disguised attempts to challenge
the socially established notions of sexuality so as to disturb the common hegemony of
heterosexuality and focus on the repressed same-sex love.
Williams’ hidden discourse of gay love rests substantially on peripheral plots and
characters. Weaving in evocative language and portraying culturally conceived pretences of
homosexuality the playwright structures these elements as a powerful code of homoeroticism.
The characters show the traits that either suggest their effeminacy or define the person as an
eccentric and an outcast. As homosexuality could not be spoken of in the American theatre of
the author’s time, there also appears the abundance of understatements and suppression of
matters inherently connected with homosexual erotics. A Streetcar Named Desire, the play
written specifically for the broad American public, is obviously one that epitomizes the most
subtle and indistinctive codes that Williams avails himself of. There is no literal mentioning
of homosexuality, yet the subject matter becomes perceptible when the protagonist
reminiscences about her past. Blanche DeBois introduces the homoerotic subplot to the play
by recalling the memory of her late husband Allan:

There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness, and tenderness that wasn’t like
a man’s, although he wasn’t the least beat effeminate looking—still—that thing was there. (Williams
2000: 527)

For the gay readers/ spectators of Williams, the author’s language employed to describe
Allan is clearly signifying. The code of character features presented here is reproduced in
many other of his works. Sensitivity, graciousness, charm and distinction, that no other
character in Williams’s drama seems to be able to define, comprises a vital part of the
homosexual subtext of his plays. Williams (2000: 527) does not explicitly describe Allan as
gay yet covertly strengthens the reader’s assumption by having Blanche comment on the issue
by meaningfully leaving the essence unspoken:

Then I found out. In the worst of possible ways. By coming suddenly into the room that I thought was
empty, but had two people in it... the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for
years...

The playwright consciously suppresses the content that could scandalize the audience and
exposes the insinuations that signal his dialogue with the initiated reader. Hence, when
portraying the rendezvous between the men, Williams indicates that this is an affair of an
older and a younger man. He echoes the archetype of a gay romance between a mature,
sophisticated and sagacious man and a handsome, innocent youth willing to admire and
follow his patron. That image as suggestively portrayed in literature and culture since
antiquity, and as invariably used by Williams in his drama and fiction is a clear implication of
homosexual subtext in the play.
A relevant element of Williams’s latent gay discourse in the play is a motif of a dead poet.
Poetry is a prominent attribute of the gay characters in his work; lonely, refined and of poetic
insight, yet usually dying before or in the drama. Allan represents the theme. Sensitive,
confused about his desires and misunderstood, he commits suicide when he is disclosed by
Blanche who screams out in public: “I saw! I know! You disgust me…” (Williams 2000:
528). It seems clear that the misunderstood poet in Williams’s plays signifies his own
emotional and social problems as a homosexual in conservative American society, and that
what he portrays in the play is the omnipresent prejudice against gay people.
One of the most potent facets of drama in which to code the homoerotic subtext is the
erotics of stage presentation. As John Clum (2002: 2) asserts, “one crucial aspect of gay male
drama […] is the presentation of the male as the object of the audience’s gaze and desire”.
Thus, in A Sreetcar, the erotic gaze of the audience is redirected from the female figure to the
male character. It is Stanley that is featured in the play as the object of desire. It is his action
that builds up the erotic tension on stage. Both Stella and Blanche finally become
overwhelmed by Stanley’s sexual allure. Blanche appears to denounce the “brutal desire” that
Stanley represents and wishes to drag her sister away from the man but she ultimately exposes
her own attraction to him saying: “The only way to live with such a man is to—go to bed with
him!” (Williams 2000: 508). Stella, on the other hand, does not deny that she is thrilled by
Stanley’s “animal force” and admits that “there are things that happen between a man and a
woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant (Williams 2000:
509).” Emphasizing the sexual attraction of the female characters towards Stanley Kowalski,
Williams exposes his own homosexual fascination with men.
As in many of his plays, also in A Streetcar, Williams reaches from mere hits and
suggestions of homosexual problems to the profound discussion of how gender and sex are
conceived in a heteronormative society. Dean Shackelford (2000: 135) asserts that “not only
do his main concerns seem rooted in a homosexual sensibility, but also his characters call into
question the whole notion of ‘natural’ gender roles and the ‘naturalness’ of what Adrienne
Roch has referred to as ‘compulsory heterosexuality’”. The playwright veils his commentary
on the suppression of gay community in the meaningful contrast between normative and
subversive sexual behaviors. He demonstrates how heterosexuality—the only right and
natural option according to the society—disqualifies any deviations from that norm. Both
Stella and Stanley embody the oppressively normative society. Stanley is everything what a
man should be according to the straight mid-century America: a bread winner, an epitome of
virility and of natural, healthy sexuality. Stella, likewise, represents the traditional woman
that finds herself perfectly suited for the role of a loyal and devoted wife that society assigned
to her. Hence, one could argue that the striking contrast there is between Stanley and Stella—
a model heterosexual and fertile couple with a baby on the way and Allan and Blanche
—“degenerate” man and promiscuous woman, destabilizes the notions of commonly
understood gender and sexuality. The message behind the configuration of sexual identities
that Williams portrays here seems to outrun Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. 1
According to Butler, the social “heterosexist economy” aims to guard the position of
heterosexuality as the only natural sexual orientation and in order to do that it “disempowers
contestatory possibilities by rendering them culturally unthinkable and unviable from the
start” (Butler 1993: 111). In accordance with that theory, Allan and Blanche fail to conform to
their gender roles and in the consequence they are rejected by the society. Gay men commit
suicide and oversexed women are confined to mental institutions. Williams clearly raises his
voice in the question of intolerance and against overpowering conformism that disturb the
lives of homosexual people to a degree that they live closeted, burdensome lives or go as far
as to commit suicide.
In order to touch on the question of homosexuality and the normative social standards that
denounce it, Tennessee Williams undertakes a camouflaged discussion of gender roles that as
artificially constructed by language and hegemonically negotiated by the society force gay
men to hide their real sexual identities. The queer theorist and critic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(2008: 68) identifies the phenomenon as hiding in the closet and while problematizing it as a
contemporary stigma of gay people and discussing it as a re-appearing trope in the works of
gay writers, she emphasizes that living the life of secrecy and constant concern about
disclosure “has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity” throughout the
twentieth century. Tennessee Williams, being himself compelled to stay in the closet long into
his writing career, well understood the problem. It seems highly viable that, because the closet
defined the lives of so many gay people at the time, the playwright introduced that motif to a
number of his works, willing to raise the gay problem but without stirring the public opinion.
1
As Butler explains, gender and sex roles are artificial constructs imposed on us by the society; identities created
by discursive powers of language and oppressively negotiated by the heterosexist economy of the contemporary
world.
Consequently, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among the symbols and signals of homoerotic
subtext, the closet may be considered a leading trope for the discussion of the coded
meanings. In order to discuss Brick as a potentially closeted homosexual, I will use the
definition of the closet as formulated by Dean Shackelford (2000: 136). According to the
critic, the closet may denote:

A hidden secret, which may or may not be revealed to the self or others, a disguise and pretence to
protect the self; a means of escape from the everyday world of harsh reality; or a shell of
protection to lie to or avoid the rejection of others.

Brick Pollitt, from the very beginning of the play seems to be hiding from others. He is
presented as a withdrawn, obviously troubled man seeking relief in alcohol. He detaches
himself from his family, does not communicate his thoughts or feelings, as if building an
imaginary protective space; inaccessible for the outside world. As it gradually becomes clear,
Brick’s withdrawal is an effect of his sorrow after the suicide of his close friend, Skipper.
Feeling guilty, as he rejected Skipper’s romantic feelings, Brick desensitizes himself drinking
alcohol. Most importantly, being cold and indifferent to his wife and remaining in a childless
marriage, Brick causes everyone around him to speculate about his possible homosexuality.
He is desperately trying to protect himself against the accusations and one can observe a
revealing panic in his behavior. In the conversation with his father, he starts to be overly
paranoid about the fact that he is suspected to be homosexual. To disguise his own potential
latent homosexuality, he shows his disgust with gay men offering a list of homophobic
abuses:

You think so, too? You think me an’ Skipper … did—sodomy!—together? You think we did dirty
things […] You think that Skipper and me were a pair of dirty old men? [...]—ducking sissies?
Queers? (Williams 2000: 947)

Williams (2000: 945) describes the scene with attention to the last detail in order to convey
the very subtle suggestion that Brick is a self-denying gay man: “[his] heart is accelerated; his
forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse”. The man is
clearly terrified of being identified as homosexual. He seems to manifest, what Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (2008) refers to in her Epistemology of the Closet as “male homosexual panic”—a
defense mechanism and a direct consequence of the fear of being acknowledged as gay or of
being a subject to homophobic discrimination. By having Brick continuously aggressively
deny the assertion that he might be gay, Williams emphasizes Brick’s fear of being outed as a
homosexual and offers his gay readers the motif so fundamental for the gay lifestyle—the
closet. It is worth pondering over the similarity between the uncertainty of Brick’s disclosure,
of his fear and defensive attitude towards it and the frightful interrogations of potentially gay
men by the security apparatus of the United States. The playwright captures here the most
essential experience of the gay community in the Cold War era and discusses “the structures
of secrecy and disclosure that organized postwar gay experience” (Corber 1997: 115).
The gay theme of Cat on the Hot Tin Roof does not limit itself to the protagonist alone.
Before introducing the main characters of the play, in the notes for the designer, Williams
(2000: 880) offers the description of the symbolic stage design that clearly foreshadows the
gay theme in the play:

The set is the bed-sitting room of a plantation home […] it hasn’t changed much since it was occupied
by the original owners of the place, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, a pair of old bachelors who shared
this room all their lives together. In other words, the room must evoke some ghosts; it is gently and
poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved a tenderness which was uncommon.

The playwright presents the set that was once a nest of a gay romantic relationship to then
introduce the reader to a distressed married couple, Brick and Margaret Pollit, who inhabit the
place. It is their “big double bed” (Williams 2000: 880), echoing the erotic relationship of the
past owners, that becomes the center of the play. It is here that the main character’s closet is at
risk of being forced open for everybody to see.
In order to weave in the homoerotic subtext, Tennessee Williams makes vivid the
technique mentioned earlier in the paper. He centers the reader’s attention on gay male
subjectivity, transferring the audience’s erotic gaze from the female character to the sexually
attractive male protagonist. Maggie the Cat, as the critics nicknamed Margaret, is the one in
the play that tries to win Brick’s attention. Although she feels unloved and ignored by Brick,
and herself speculates about his homosexuality, she cannot stop loving him. In the upsurge of
emotions, she desperately admits:

I can’t see a man but you! Even with my eyes closed, I just see you! Why don’t you get ugly, why don’t
you please get fat or ugly or something so that I could stand it? (Williams 2000: 892)

Making Maggie desire Brick so badly and admire his muscular body, Williams manipulates
the reader’s point of view. As Dean Shackelford (1998: 108) observes: “As Maggie gazes on
her beloved Brick’s body, the audience itself is so directed.” Williams, himself enchanted
with Brick’s carnality, directs also the audience’s erotic interest towards the character, thus
letting the reader know about the gay undertone of the play. Additionally, he once again
undermines the socially created power relations between a man and a woman. By showing the
female making advances on the indifferent man, begging him for affection and yearning for
sexual pleasure, he portrays a subverted version of what society believes is a gender defined,
natural sexual behavior. Williams breaks the social decorum in his play in order to expose the
narrow-mindedness and forced prudishness of American people in the sphere of human
sexuality, at the same time alluding towards the consequential intolerance of the society to
sexual minorities.
Another covert signal of homoerotic subtext in the play is Big Daddy’s potential
homosexuality. The father, while not consternated about Brick’s possible homosexuality,
confides in his son that he has “knocked around” himself in his time and suggests that the
time spent on the plantation taught him tolerance. To emphasize the allusion, the playwright
endows that scene with a note for the director: “The following scene should be played with
great consternation, with most of the power leashed but palpable in what is left unspoken.
(Williams 2000: 945)” For the initiated readers, who are familiar with Williams’s canon, the
fact that Big Daddy was a protégé of the gay couple and became an heir of their plantation
clearly signals a submerged homosexual plot. Williams offers here the motif inscribed in
homosexual literature—the “economics of desire” (Burhm 1991: 524), a theme recurrent in
his works denoting the circumstances in which body and homosexual desire become
commodities. Moreover, Big Daddy suffers from a disease that is recurrent in his works.
Bowel cancer frequently poses as a signifier of homosexuality in the playwright’s work,
unfortunately is frequently pointed as the mark of Williams’s guilt-ridden portrayal of
homosexuality.
The author’s lesser known and discussed one-act plays provide firm evidence of the
author’s consistency in his attempts to force the issues of homosexuality and homophobia to
the surface. Even as early as in 1938, in his play Not About the Nightingales, Williams
noticeably alludes to social attitudes concerning homosexuality. Introducing the issue, once
again, only via a peripheral character and marginal, elusive episode, Williams appears to
comment on the social standards that reproduce the distorted portrait of a homosexual and that
victimize gay people as members of society. Williams introduces the audience to a man that
could be defined as gay but largely according to popular hetronormative standards. Queen is
one of the inmates in a large American prison. The playwright presents the man as a delicate,
effeminate man, speaking in a high tenor voice, and preoccupied with the loss of his manicure
set that was thrown away by one of his co-prisoners. While these are stereotypical
homosexual features perceptible for an average American theatre-goer, Williams’s gay
audience must be able to decode the message that is hidden underneath the obvious.
First of all, the depiction of the gay character that Williams offers his readers, though
appearing to be a one of ridicule, is in fact deliberately employed by the playwright to expose
the common fallacy about gay people as weak, pathetic and effeminate. The clichéd
stereotype of a gay man is a recurring motif in many other plays of the author and is often
used to manifest the playwright’s personal critique of cultural misconception of
homosexuality.
The very title of the play conceals a word heralding the homoerotic code. The word
nightingale with seemingly no relevance to the plot, according to Lyle Leverich (1995: 404)
carries weight as being the author’s personal code for homosexual desire. As a matter of fact,
nightingales singing is an expression that Williams (2006) repeatedly used in his Memoirs to
denote homosexual encounter. To ground the argument, Richard Kramer (Kolin 1998: 83)
quotes the definition of the word from Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, where nightingale
signifies “ecstasy carrying one beyond the present”.
Queen appears to be disregarded by other men in the prison. During the play, the
character repeatedly expresses the sorrow over his own life saying, “All my life I’ve been
persecuted by people because I’m refined … because I’m sensitive … Sometimes I wish I was
dead” (Williams 2000: 114). The following quote is a critique of social prejudice against
homosexuals and a hint towards the tremendous effects it had on young homosexuals. Many
of Williams’s gay readers may certainly read his allusion towards the increased numbers of
suicide cases that were noted in the 1940s and 50s, during Senator McCarthy’s with-hunt and
the infamous Lavender Scare pervading the United States.
Auto-Da-Fé is another one-act drama, authored by Tennessee Williams, that displays the
discussed codes of homosexuality. Although the words like homosexual or gay are not uttered
in the play, from its very beginning Williams offers his readers suggestive allusions to the gay
history and culture. The first signifiers of the gay subtext are hidden in the title and the setting
of the play. Auto-da-fé is a word, originally denoting the penance for heresy and a common
ritual of burning at stake. However, as Williams’s gay audiences are aware, in medieval times
auto-da-fé was also a frequent punishment for the sin of sodomy. Hence, the title evokes the
implication of the gay problem in the play. The set of the play, New Orleans, is evocative as a
city widely known for its history of being the place of moral and sexual freedoms. In
Williams’s time the city was considered a haven for the various outcasts of society; people
with nonstandard lifestyles and sexual orientations. Thus, also the setting of the play
foreshadows the discussion of homosexuality.
Putting forward the symbols of homoeroticism in the opening of the play, the playwright
introduces the reader to the story of Eloi, a distressed and deeply troubled man that
distinctively mirrors the set of character and behavioral features that Willimas employs to
design his repressed gay characters. The protagonist represents a stereotype of a gay man; a
mama’s boy who at the age of thirty still lives with his overprotective and domineering
mother. Since he is presented as an excessively anxious and agitated man, haunted by
unwarranted health problems, psychoanalytical reading suggests that Eloi’s body rebels
against the repression of his latent desires. His behavior appears largely unreasonable.
Obsessed over other’s immorality and corruption he becomes intensely excited. In
conversation with his mother the man bursts out: “This town should be razed …condemned
and demolished… Condemn it I say! And purify it with fire.” (Williams 2000: 363)
Answering his mother’s remarks that such way of thinking is absurd, Eloi replies: “I have a
good precedence for it … All through the Scriptures are cases of cities destroyed by the
justice of fire when they got to be nests of foulness!” (Williams 2000: 363). The above words
pose a reference to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that as culturally associated
with the practice of sodomy vividly bring the issue of homosexuality to the surface of the
play.
The structure of the play is based on the main character’s paranoiac fear of disclosure. It is
homosexual panic that drives the turn of events in the play. Eloi is burdened with a secret. He
obsesses over his own privacy and is convinced that somebody searches through his
belongings. As the man later on confesses, the matter that bothers him so deeply is the lewd
photograph that he accidentally discovered at work and did not dispose of. It portrays two
naked figures and, according to Eloi, “passes beyond all description” (Williams 2000: 368).
He explains that the photograph comes from the letter sent by a university student to an
opulent antique dealer and that it fell out of the envelope. Describing the circumstances of the
troubling incident, Tennessee Willimas purposefully uses the language of evasion and does
not let the reader know what inadmissible image was enclosed in the mail. He does not
specify the sexes of the two naked figures yet he notes that the two people involved in the
situation were a younger and an older man, passing a remark that clearly implies a
relationship understood in the gay circles as a symbol of a homosexual bond. When Eloi visits
the student, apparently to admonish him against enclosing perverse content in mail, it is
suggested that the student misunderstands Eloi’s intentions and probably propositions the man
for sex. As Eloi confides in his mother, he says: “The sender began to be ugly. Abusive. I
can’t repeat the charges. The evil suggestions! I ran from the room” (Williams 2000: 369).
Confronted with the truth of his homosexual desires, the Eloi feels threatened that the truth
might come into light. Since that incident, he feels uneasy and overly suspicious. He admits
that he intended to report the situation to authorities but he felt paralyzed. The longer he
postpones taking proper action he becomes more delusional of being monitored and of his
closets being searched. Ultimately, Eloi does not bear the emotional and psychological
pressure. Overwhelmed by homosexual panic, Eloi locks himself in the house and sets fire to
it; executing the punishment of auto-da-fe on himself.
Auto-da-fe touches on the dilemmas that were inherent to the lives of homosexual men in
the mid-century America. It discusses the question of self-acceptance for gay people, the
problems ingrained in living a closeted and repressed sexual life and points to the destructive
social attitudes towards homosexuality. It is perhaps the most articulate and revealing play of
Williams as the symbolism that the playwright proposes seems acutely dense and vivid. In
effect, it becomes palpable that the playwright speaks out in code about the issues that were
most fundamental and pressing for the gay community in the twentieth century.
The gay criticism and the scholarship in queer theory that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s
are divided over the interpretation of Williams’ enigmatic and vague writing. Among the
critics who acknowledge Williams’ contribution to the gay literary canon and esteem his bold
critiques of oppressively heteronormative society of mid-century America, there are those
who claim that the playwright’s evasive treatment of homosexuality is informed by his
internalized homophobia. As the works of Tennessee Williams become reexamined with
particular respect to their coded meanings, it becomes increasingly legitimate a claim that the
accusations of homophobic attitudes issued towards the playwright neglect to acknowledge
the socio-historical context of his creativity and the complexity of homosexual subjectivity
that Williams constructs in his writing. It is vital to observe that the playwright not merely
manages to circumvent the taboo of the epoch in which he lived but he subverts the
mainstream ways of thinking about gender and sexual desire. With consequence and deep
insight into the problems of gay people, in the times of most intense political correctness,
Tennessee Williams accomplished portraying the social and psychological complexity of
homosexuality and brought into the theatrical heritage the precedent of doing so.
References:

Williams, Tennessee 2000: Auto-da-Fé. In: Mel Gussow and W. Kenneth. Holditch (eds). 2000: Plays 1937-

1955. New York: Library of America.

Williams, Tennessee 2000: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In: Mel Gussow and W. Kenneth. Holditch (eds). 2000: Plays

1937-1955. New York: Library of America.

Williams, Tennessee 2000: Not About Nightingales. In: Mel Gussow and W. Kenneth. Holditch (eds). 2000:

Plays 1937-1955. New York: Library of America.

Williams, Tennessee 2000: A Streetcar Named Desire. In: Mel Gussow and W. Kenneth. Holditch (ed)s. Plays

1937-1955. New York: Library of America.

Williams, Tennessee and John Waters 2006: Memoirs. New York: New Directions Publishing.

Secondary Sources:

Bruhm, Steven 1991: Blackmailed by Sex: Tennessee Williams and the Economics of Desire. In: Modern Drama

34.4, 524-30.

Butler, Judith 1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge.

Clum, John M. 2002: GLBTQ Modern Drama. In: http://www.glbtq.com/literature/williams_t.html ED 04/2009.

Corber, Robert J. 1997: Tennessee Williams and the Politics of the Closet. In: Homosexuality in Cold War

America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 107-34.

Kolin, Philip C. 1998: Tennessee Williams: a Guide to Research and Performance. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Leverich, Lyle 1995: Tom: the Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown.

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In: Tennessee Williams Annual Review I, 113-19.

Shackelford, Dean 2000: Is There a Gay Man in This Text?: Subverting the Closet in A Streetcar Named Desire.

In: Michael J. Mayer (ed). Literature and Homosexuality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 135-59.