Homoeroticism in the Works of Tennessee Williams

Author: Izabela Gradecka

INTRODUCTION

Homosexuality has been an element of human culture since the very beginnings

of civilization. It has had a wavering history of both repression and acceptance as the

attitudes towards it have changed alongside human thought, religion and political

leadership. Literary tradition has recorded these ups and downs. Philosophers and

writers, beginning with Plato and Socrates, have dealt with and discussed homoerotic

love either advocating it or objecting to it. Despite its long and difficult history, the

undeniable presence of gay love in all societies and the lasting struggle for respect and

equal rights, homosexuality still evokes ambiguous feelings and is not entirely accepted

as either a way of life or a motif in popular arts or literature.

Traceable records of the existence of homoerotic love go back to ancient times

when homosexuality was an unopposed and often welcomed way of life. In many

cultures, a man’s sexual life usually involved both intercourses with women and with

young boys. Most famously, same-sex love is known to have been a part of everyday

life in Greece and Rome, the cradles of European civilization, where it was widely

approved of and not infrequently admired, associated with gallantry and righteousness

(Holleran, 36). Studies conducted on Greek homosexuality report a practice of nurturing

homoerotic love among the warriors in order to reinforce their morale and courage

during the battles. The ‘armies of lovers’ like the Sacred Band of Thebes were designed

to fight most valiantly and fearlessly (Crompton, 69). Modern anthropological research

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reveals that the arts and literature, even mythographic materials of antiquity, are

abundant with evidence of homosexual love during that time. There are vases, statues

and inscriptions found, portraying males in intimate situations. Above all, there are

some acknowledged literary and lyrical pieces dealing with homoerotic love. Platonian

“Symposium,” for instance, glorifies homophile love and describes it as more refined

than a heterosexual relationship (Kwarteng, 12). Socrates, a well-known and influential

Greek philosopher, fostered homoerotic love among his disciples. Both students of

Socrates, Plato and Xenophon, described their teacher as being partial to his adolescent

male audience, and approving of love between men, which he however, considered as

inferior to spiritual feeling, and thought of the emotion mainly as a means to educational

growth and broadening the mind (Holleran, 37).

History demonstrates that same-sex love gradually became less ubiquitous and

accepted, as the voices against it became increasingly outspoken. Soon, with budding

Christianity, which considers sexual activity for any purposes other than procreation

sinful, came the widespread condemnation of homosexuality. Any demonstrations of

homoeroticism in Europe were banned, and those who practiced it were executed. Luis

Crompton claims in his book titled Homosexuality and Civilization that the history of

persecution of queer love began with the emergence of Christian religion and the anti-

homosexual laws of emperor Justinian. In the Middle Ages the term ‘sodomy’ was

coined to describe homoeroticism as the “crime against nature.” It was used as a

reference to the depraved citizens of Sodom who, according to The Old Testament,

were destroyed for their disobedience to God, and were later wrongly attributed the

guilt of homosexuality (Holleran, 37). Throughout the medieval times the condemnation

of same-sex love increased; the sin soon became a serious crime and was severely

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punished, often with the death by auto-da-fe. Homoerotic intercourse continued to be a

heavy criminal offence until the late Victorian times.

The Restoration era was a time when little recognition was given to the existence

of sodomy in England. Aristocracy considered homosexuality an atrocious act,

practiced only in foreign countries. However, despite this attitude, homosexual themes

were present in many aspects of public life including literature; in the Elizabethan and

Jacobean theatre same-sex desire was a frequently discussed matter and the issue of

gender was challenged by such recognized writers as Shakespeare and Marlowe

(Mann, 3). The last execution conducted for sodomy took place in 1830 but

homosexuality was still a penitentiary offence during the reign of Queen Victoria.

In the Victorian era, setting a good social example was believed to be a civic

duty, though the period was known for its contradictory, double-standard morality.

Along with sexual repression, a severe system of justice and strict morality, there

existed such vices as prostitution which was very popular with Victorian men and

surprisingly not illegal at that time. Homosexuality, however, was denounced and

punished relentlessly. English society realized the existence and common practice of

homoeroticism, though they did not discuss the issue publicly, unless such a case was

brought to court (“Homosexuality and the Law,” E-source).

Oscar Wilde, an influential and prominent writer of the era, is believed to be a

symbolic figure in the evolution of a gay sensibility, and an archetype of a homosexual

lifestyle. Although he was a “notorious homosexual,” (“The Secret Life of Oscar

Wilde,” E-source) he did not admit participation in, as he called it when testifying, “the

love that dare not speak its name” (Hyde, 61). Wilde denied being gay several times,

but despite this fact he is recognized and respected today for raising the issue of same-

sex desire in his writing, during the time when it was hazardous to do so (Summers, 2).

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In the nineteenth century, the subculture of dandies came to life and developed. Wilde

became a model of this trend; at that time a dandy’s appearance happened to be a

recognition token for gay men. The term dandy described a man who took special care

of his appearance and personal culture, cultivated nonchalance and the love for the self.

Nevertheless, it did not survive after the trial of Oscar Wilde. Many homosexuals left

England for fear of persecution and criminal conviction.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, society was still reticent and rather

secretive about the issues of homosexuality. Some gay artists dared to raise the theme,

with the effect of stirring social opinion, but without revealing the truth about their own

sexual identities. The issue was expressed only ambiguously, so that it was conceivable

exclusively for those in the know. Some American writers tried to publish their works

on the subject abroad or in less popular presses, yet the homosexual taboo was still too

strong for the artists to break. Later in the twentieth century, the straight-forwardness

and the amount of significant, candid publications were gradually becoming more

present in the world of literature. The openness about sexuality was slowly becoming

characteristic of some authors and artists, but then in the fifties the fear of repression, of

rejection and lack of understanding among the gay writers strengthened again (Cady, E-

source).

In the 1950s, the suppression of gay people in the United States became a part of

government policy; homosexuals, alongside communists, were considered a national

security risk. McCarthy’s ‘witch-hunt’ was infamous for destroying the lives of many

public figures who were suspected to be homosexuals or communists. Plenty of writers

who aimed to avoid these repressions were described as closeted, as they did not speak

openly about their homosexuality. In the post-war times, it was frequently a must to

remain in the shade—not to disclose one’s own homosexuality—which came to be

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described by critics and queer theorists as hiding in the ‘closet’ (Corber, 116). Writers

who wanted to discuss the issues of homoeroticism and homophobia veiled homosexual

meanings in their works, using symbols and language that were recognized only by the

initiated.

A major turning point in homosexual awareness and the approach to it was the

Stonewall riot in 1969, in New York. The police forayed into the Stonewall Inn, a hot

spot popular with homosexuals and assaulted many of its patrons. A number of anti-

homophobic demonstrations followed. The repression and prejudice of the government

and society were finally exposed and, in effect, the event gave an impetus to the

homosexual liberation movement. Since that moment in history, ‘coming out of the

closet’ was finally possible without repercussions. Many young people realized that the

repression of their feelings and the dismissal by society were not justified, that they, in

fact, had a right to live without fear, not hiding or suffering (Hugh, 677). This turn of

the tide allowed American writers and other artists to come out and contribute to the gay

literary tradition. One such characteristic and significant figure for the homosexual

literature was Tennessee Williams, whose work deals with homoerotic love in a number

of different ways, characteristic of the periods in which he wrote and of his struggle to

accept his own sexuality.

Tennessee Williams touched upon the issues of queer love very early in his

writing career, yet he was not straightforward about them until the post-Stonewall era.

The early one-act plays by the author foreshadowed his future development of the

homosexual theme. At that stage of his writing career, his works were fraught with

figurative language, tropes and references to homoeroticism which were not legible at

first glance. He let himself discuss the theme more boldly in his short stories and poems,

which were not exposed so much to broader public as his Broadway plays, yet he

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consistently veiled them with some ambiguity, using figurative and semi-coded

language. His dramas designed for stage also featured gay and homophobic discourses,

but again Williams handled them in such a way that these ideas were not intelligible for

most readers. In his later, more candid works, whenever homoerotic motives appeared,

the apparent message frequently was that homosexuality was deviant or unacceptable.

The post-Stonewall works, which were much more open and bold and eventually

presented gay characters without reserve, still featured dark and malignant images of

homosexuality. The only truly favorable treatment of same-sex love in Williams’s work

could be found in his poetry.

For gay audience, the issues raised by Williams were conspicuous and

meaningful. He touched upon enigmatic matters and discussed doubts and anxieties

which deeply concerned his gay audience. Nevertheless, the playwright’s overall

creative approach towards the theme of homosexuality is burdened with images of

death, violence and decay. Williams did not deal with homoerotic issues in an optimistic

way; acceptance and rejection of one’s own sexuality interweaved in his works.

The aim of this thesis is to trace manifestations of homosexuality and approaches

towards gay issues, specific for different periods in which Williams wrote and for the

genres he used, and also to analyze the tropes and the main modus operandi specific for

homosexual themes in his writings. The study is to include in the first chapter: the

implications of the gay question in Tennessee Williams’s early plays, together with

modes of their expression such as ways of presenting the characters, a unique linguistic

code and symbolism. The first chapter is designed to focus on the indirect and ambiguous

manifestations of homosexuality in the author’s work. The second chapter is going to

present half-open and open manifestations of homoeroticism in the later

post-Stonewall plays and stories of the playwright, in which the overtly gay characters

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finally appear. Ultimately, the last chapter is to analyze the positive view of

homosexuality in the author’s poetry and concentrate on the author’s candid expression

of all different aspects of gay life.

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 CHAPTER I

Veiled Homosexuality in Tennessee Williams’s Early Plays.

The indirect, equivocal treatment of homosexuality by Tennessee Williams has

often confounded not so much his readers as his critics. The manifestations of

homoerotic feelings in the playwright’s works take regular forms, but the extent to which

they are coded changes. They also seem to convey a considerably unstable outlook on the

gay issues. Those factors seem to vary according to the forms of literary discourse and

the times of their formation. Hence, it is argued that there is a division between public

and private writing in Williams’s works. Namely, the playwright does not avoid open

discussion of homosexuality in his short stories and poems, even in the later dramas, yet

he more or less completely veils those topics in his pre-Stonewall plays—plays written

before the year 1969 (Corber, 115). These early dramas discuss the problems of

homoerotic love exclusively between the lines and in figurative language. In some of

them like Auto-Da-Fe, Something Unspoken, Not about Nightingales or A Streetcar

Named Desire, homosexuality might be spoken of or hinted at, yet the words ‘gay’ or

‘homosexual’ are not actually articulated by the characters. His short stories, on the other

hand, such as One Arm, Desire and Black Masseur, Hard Candy are definitely more

candid as they are not exposed so much to a wide audience. They present openly gay

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characters with their ways of lives and behaviour, not excluding the telling symbols of a

homosexual culture.

1.1 Veiled homoeroticism in Williams’s pre-Stonewall plays.

Tennessee Williams’s pre-Stonewall plays do not discuss the gay question or

present gay characters without pretense. Consequently, his writing style has been

criticized for being evasive and for displaying the marks of internalized homophobia

(Clum, 1989, 166). The author has repeatedly been reproved for his vague and indirect

approach to gay issues. However, it was the social policy of the time when Williams

wrote his greatest pieces that limited his writing: a policy which condemned any

symptoms of homosexual orientation or even the indications of male effeminacy.

‘Coming-out’ was dangerous in the fifties, especially for public figures haunted by

McCarthy’s “witch hunt.” Everybody who discussed homosexuality in broad daylight,

was suspected of being gay and thus of being a national risk, or even a traitor.

Nevertheless, Williams did not avoid discussing the subject; only his way to convey

homosexual meanings was not straightforward. He chose “other means” to express the

prohibited matters (qtd. in Corber 107), which de facto not only gave him the freedom to

express the matters that concerned him, but also built up “soaring, lyrical intensity of his

best work” (Hirsch, 11). There is an ample variety of implications of homosexual issues

in almost all the early plays by Tennessee Williams. The author realizes them through the

means of both characters and various artistic devices such—as among others—motifs,

symbols, charactonyms, imagery etc. Dean Shackelford, who analyzed his primary plays,

asserts that the playwright definitely aimed to discuss gay problems in his works even at

the earliest stages of his writing career:

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 That Tennessee Williams was a product of his own time is clearly evident
in his own ambivalence about writing openly gay plays in the pre-
Stonewall era. However, by studying the plays written as early as the
recently published Not about Nightingales suggests, it becomes clear that
homosexuality was an issue he wanted to explore openly even at the
beginning of his career. (50)

In the author’s earliest plays, there appear characters, symbols and motifs which suggest

a coded homosexual discourse. Looking at them more closely will reveal certain

common features of their presentation characteristic of the early stage of Tennessee

Williams’s writing career.

1.1.1 The characters

The gay subtext in Williams’s plays is primarily suggested by the characteristics

of the personae the playwright creates. Among the characters there are those who display

fragile and effeminate looks, who demonstrate excessive attachment to their mothers, and

those who can hardly be recognized as homosexuals by their appearance, but could

definitely be judged as such by their characters or behaviours. The figures pictured by

Williams are outsiders: extremely sensitive, exceptionally prudish, and often too

vulnerable to live in the contemporary brute world (Hirsh, 13). They are keen aesthetes,

longing for emotional bonds, literally or metaphorically confined individuals desiring

purification and deliverance (Peters, E-source) which they almost always achieve by

means of self-destruction. Most of the characters are motivated by fear of revealing some

secrets they hide and are hindered by unexplained health discomforts. The usage of

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features mentioned here is an extremely significant element of Williams’s writing

technique. It comprises a key to decoding the gay characters and homosexual discourse

in his works and proves that the playwright always wanted to discuss gay issues, yet

being aware of the social convention and the political correctness of his own times

decided to veil them, thus protecting his career from a potential danger.

Beginning with the most suggestive presentations of Williams’ gay characters,

one of the first figures that should be introduced here is Eloi, a protagonist of a one-act

play titled Auto-Da-Fe. The young man is a postal worker, living with his mother in a

French Quarter in New Orleans. The reader never finds out that Eloi is a homosexual but

his disposition, behaviour and relationship with his mother definitely suggest that. He is a

culturally created stereotype of a gay man as a mama’s boy. Although Eloi is an adult

man, he still lives with his mother, who incessantly controls and criticizes him. Stifled by

the relationship with his domineering mother and by the fear of his own repressed

sexuality, he has unwarranted health problems that seem a perfect justification for his

desperate emotional state. Similarly to Williams’s other coded gay characters, Eloi “is a

frail man in his late thirties, gaunt, ascetic type with feverish eyes” (360). Being

excessively moralistic and critical about other people is just a way for him to reject his

own desires, which he strongly deplores. It is evident that the young man is afraid of a

disclosure, he is nervous and his mother can see that he conceals something. The catalyst

for his behaviour is a photograph of two naked people (whose gender is not specified)

that accidentally comes into his hands. Eloi is frightened of being accused of perverted

practices, the nature of which is not explicitly presented to the readers. He constantly

speaks of his ailings and breathing problems, and the bad influence which the apparently

corrupted place they live in has on his health and state of mind. Jittery and fanatic in his

conduct, he claims that he is tormented by “the conscience of all dirty men” (366). It is

11
alluded that Eloi’s strongest longing is purification. In the conversation with his mother

he constantly speaks of burning, purifying, and other people’s sins, never confessing his

own sinful thoughts. Eventually, in a sudden upsurge of emotions Eloi locks himself

inside and sets fire to the house. This last act of the character suggests his inability to

come to terms with his own sexuality and displays a common feature of Williams’s gay

characters—an urge for self-destruction. Due to the overwhelming feeling of guilt Eloi

burns himself perceiving his own death as an ultimate end to the evil that haunts him.

Although the initiated audience can infer the nature of Eloi’s secret, it is not the plot that

conveys it but the main character’s appearance, personality and behaviour. In this way

Tennessee Williams puts forward a clear message concerning a gay problem, yet leaves it

illegible for the majority of his audience.

Another Williams’s character who displays the features of a homosexual is

Queen, one of the prisoners presented in Not About Nightingales. The reader finds out

that Queen is a considerably fragile man, sensitive to hospitals and needles, one who

speaks in a high tenor voice. During the play Queen desperately looks for his manicure

set, standing for his homosexual orientation, which was thrown away by another inmate.

He constantly talks about his poor fate: “All my life I’ve been persecuted by people

because I’m refined ... because I’m sensitive ... Sometimes I wish I was dead” (114).

Prison is not a place for Queen. He is too delicate and cannot find his place among other

prisoners. One can judge by his nickname, his voice and his peculiar monologues that he

is gay. However, without a certain knowledge about homosexual subculture, it is still not

easy to identify Queen as a gay person.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche describes her late husband as queerly

sensitive and genteel, giving us a hint of his gay disposition. As she reminisces about him

she says:

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

This “uncommon tenderness” that Blanche is talking about is a common mark of

Williams’ gay figures. Here, it is again the description of Allan that tells the reader that

he is gay. Although his features might not suggest that unequivocally, Blanche’s words

clearly confirm that:

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...
(527)

The playwright does not use words like ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’, but suggests that there is

something not right about Allan’s disposition. He indicates that it was a shocking

experience for Blanche to find her husband in one room with another, older man, his

close friend about whose existence she had not known. Williams avoids any direct

statements that Allan is gay, yet he gives us a suggestive image which confirms our

supposition. Eventually, Allan is also the one among other Williams’s gay characters

who cannot accept his own homosexuality and commits suicide as a result.

Descriptions of Eloi’s, Queen’s and Allan’s appearance and conduct vividly

indicate their homosexual orientation. They belong to a group of characters in Williams’

early plays that he pictured most suggestively and boldly. In his other early plays,

though, he revealed much more ambivalent renderings of his potentially gay characters;

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof delivers sound evidence to support this argument. John Clum

13
asserts that this play is “the most vivid dramatic embodiment of [his] mixed signals

regarding homosexuality and his obsession with public disclosure” (qtd. in Corber, 115).

He believes that Williams, by being evasive about gay issues in his writings, displays the

marks of “internalized homophobia,” whereas Corber demonstrates in his book titled

Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity that there

is consistency in Williams’ subtextual discussion of gay problems which is especially

noticeable in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Corber argues that vagueness and understatements

built in the play “manifest similar investment in the structures of secrecy and disclosure

that organized postwar gay male experience” (115). Corber’s presumptions might be

illustrated, inter alia, by the protagonist of the play, Brick; a married man who appears to

have a serious problem with his sexual identity and is evidently terrified of being

acknowledged as a homosexual.

Brick, is a character that cannot be judged as a homosexual for his looks alone.

He is definitely the embodiment of virility: handsome and muscular, a former athlete

whose shape has not been corrupted by his compulsive drinking. Only his numerous

denials of the fact that there was nothing homoerotic between him and his late friend

Skipper, everybody else’s suspicions, and his cool, asexual treatment of his wife Maggie

do suggest to the audience that he is gay. Despite the ominous remarks of being a

homosexual, he never admits that himself. The uninitiated reader cannot know whether

the character is gay because Brick denies it very decidedly, and even aggressively. His

violent and feverish denial and indignation, though typical of a Williams’s homosexual

character, make it difficult to judge Brick’s sexuality. His excitable and outraged

response to Big Daddy’s insinuations of him being homosexual may, on the one hand,

suggest that he is a closeted homosexual: one who is paralyzed by the thought of a

disclosure. Nevertheless, at the end of the play, Brick unwillingly reunites with Maggie

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and the reader finds out they are planning on having a baby. Williams never uncovers the

truth about Brick’s true sexual identity. As usual, he leaves the reader’s curiosity

unsatisfied and does not reveal the truth about Brick’s and his friend Skipper’s

relationship. Instead, he pictures him as displaying behaviours that are typical of a self-

loathing homosexual; obsessing over what others might think, terrified of ‘being branded

as a queer’ (Clum, E-source). Shackelford asserts that Williams deliberately creates such

an image of this character:

A frequent visitor to Freudian analysts, Williams clearly portrays Brick as

exhibiting all the traits normally associated with latent homosexuality:
indifference to women, excessive attention to masculinity, and
internalized homophobia. (Shackelford, 111)

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams demonstrates how the social convention and

prejudice against gay men work in contemporary America. Brick does not desire his own

wife and fears confrontation with facts and reality. He chooses to numb himself with

alcohol and justifies it by saying: “Mendacity is the system that we live in. Liquor is one

way out an’ the death’s the other...” (953). Brick’s words seem to speak for most of the

homosexual characters in Williams works: they always die or like Brick surrender to

self-destruction, so that they will not have to confront the straight homophobic society of

their times.

Perhaps one of the least straightforward and most problematic presentations of

homosexual emotionality in Williams’s characters is enclosed in The Strangest Kind of

Romance, a one-act play written in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century. The

protagonist of the play is Little Man, a manual worker, who is looking for a place to rent

in a factory town. Williams does not depart from his consistent descriptive technique of a

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gay character coded as a fragile and neurotic figure. The man is “dark and more delicate

and nervous in appearance than labourers usually are” (135). Unhappy with his hard,

manual job and emotionally lonely, he finds his kindred spirit in a cat called Nitchevo.

He speaks with the cat as if it was a person: very tenderly, obviously finding some quaint

comfort in those conversations. After losing his job and being humiliated at work, he

comforts his companion: “But now we forget about that, that’s over and done! It’s night,

we are alone together—the room is warm—we sleep….” (142). Little Man definitely

treats Nitchevo as his life companion, feels safe and calm in having him by his side. This

affection and love towards a cat is significant of a gay figure. According to Dean

Shackelford, Williams refers here to the stereotype of a homosexual: as preferring those

weaker and more feminine animals as their pets (53). Moreover, Little Man rejects the

sexual attentions of the landlady and gives very enigmatic justifications of this unmanly

and unnatural behaviour of which she accuses him. The woman notices:

Just you. Carrying on a one-sided conversation with a cat! Funny, yes but
kind of a pitiful too. You a man not even middle-aged yet—devoting all
that care and time and affection—on what? A stray alley cat … The
Strangest kind of romance…A man—and a cat! What we mustn’t do is
disregard nature. Nature says—‘men take women—or men be lonesome!’
(She smiles at him and coyly and moves a little closer) Nature has
certainly never said, ‘men take cat’. (144)

Little man abruptly responds to that saying: “Nature has never said anything to me.” He

says he did listen to nature but there was nothing to hear apart from his own

“troublesome questions” (144). Williams suggests here that his protagonist is a disturbed

man not able to understand his own nature and perhaps also his unusual sexual needs and

desires. He also points out that Little Man is a closeted individual, scared of opening

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himself to other people, fearing his otherness and a possible rejection on the part of

society. He confides his personality problems in the landlady saying: “The body is

only—a shell. It may be alive—when what’s inside is too afraid to come out! It stays

locked up and alone! Single! Private!”(146). The man does not understand his emotions

and feels troubled by them. He wants to hide in his rented room with his beloved cat,

because only then he can feel secure. Williams puts forward numerous hints and

allusions to the fact that his protagonist is a troubled homosexual, though they are

certainly not decipherable as such to a reader who does not know the biography of the

author and his other writings. Little Man is another gay character that Tennessee

Williams chose to veil in ambiguity, in order to secretly discuss gay problems and reach

his queer audience.

By the fifties it seems already obvious for the gay readers of Tennessee Williams

that the playwright runs a subtle and mostly veiled gay male discourse in his plays. Thus

quite unexpectedly, among Williams’s gay characters there appear two women—

Cornelia Scott and Grace Lancaster—the characters of the one-act titled Something

Unspoken, first published in 1959. Cornelia and Grace have known each other for 15

years, have been co-workers and companions. At the beginning of the play there is no

reason to think that there might exist some romantic feelings between them. The first

impression is that the two women are nothing more than just dear friends. However, then

one captures the tension between them. It becomes visible that Cornelia wants to

confront Grace about their friendship, and that Grace repetitively escapes that

confrontation. When Cornelia starts on the issue of the feelings between them, Grace

rushes to the phonograph to play some music and changes the subject, yet this time she is

stopped and confronted:

17
 Grace!—Don’t you feel there’s—something unspoken between us? ... It’s
just that I feel that there’s something unspoken between us that ought to be
spoken. . . . Why are you looking at me like that? ... With positive horror!
(868).

Grace admits that she is not strong enough to acknowledge the truth, that she is afraid of

talking about things between them that have not been uttered for fifteen years. It is never

stated in the play that it is actually feeling of love that keeps the two elder ladies together

and that evokes such strong emotions. One can only think so through noticing some

behavioural traits that are characteristic of many other gay characters in Williams’s

plays. Grace suffers from an unwarranted condition—a muscular contraction—that is

said to come from a certain tension that is not specified. This chronic ailment is

addressed at a certain point in the play and emphasized. Cornelia questions her friend

about it, in a noticeably provoking manner: “What strain does it come from, Grace? ...

The strain of what? Would you like me to tell you?” (864). Following these assailing

questions, Grace, one more time, avoids the answer and leaves the room, embarrassed

and frightened of the confrontation with the truth. It is mentioned a few times during the

play that Grace fears the unspoken to be discussed: “Several times you’ve rushed away

from me as if I’d threatened you with a knife ... It is always when something is

almost—spoken—between us!” (864). She represents a closeted homosexual who is

aware of public indignation that would arise if the truth came to light. She is excessively

concerned about her position and appearance in the Confederate Daughters’ Society,

afraid of a disclosure and public rejection, which has in fact already happened. Grace is

cast aside by the other ladies in the society group she belongs to—what she wanted to

conceal has been already discovered. Cornelia, on the other hand, struggles with her

feelings, longs for them to be expressed and acknowledged. She asks rhetorically: “Am I

18
sentenced to silence for all the life-time?” (867) thus calling for acceptance and approval

of her homosexual feelings.

Here in Something Unspoken, as women’s relationships are not so uncommon and

unequivocal as men’s relationships, it becomes even harder for an ordinary reader or a

spectator to notice the homosexual discourse in the play. These two women, although

apparently representing lesbian love, display the same behaviours and characteristics as

their male counterparts in other Williams’s plays. It is clear that the play examines the

problem of self-acceptance of homosexuals (Shackelford, 51) in general: both

homosexual women and men.

1.1.2 Artistic devices

Encoding gay meanings demanded from Tennessee Williams using quite

uncommon artistic devices. One of them is transferring the audience’s erotic gaze from

female to male characters, implying a typical homosexual, and also his own fascination

with the male body. The author aimed to focus the readers’ attention on his male

characters in order to convey the idea of same-sex (male-male) attraction. As Foster

Hirsch notices in his book A Portrait of the Artist – The Plays of Tennessee Williams:

Because homosexuality was in the forties and fifties an unmentionable

subject Williams had to transfer to his often grasping, hot-blooded female
characters his own intense attraction to men. (12)

Hirsch asserts that in Williams’s works it is man who is to be desired, not woman. Males

and females swap their roles in his plays; women are strong, sexual aggressors who plead

19
for attention, men wait to be courted (12). The means that let Tennessee Williams speak

of gay sensibility in subtle, unnoticeable ways included sowing gay sensitivity in women,

and transferring the audience’s gaze from female to male characters. The writer

frequently presents his male characters as the objects of the audience’s gaze and desire,

as opposed to traditional women-centered scenes (Shackelford, 1998, 104). In Cat on a

Hot Tin Roof it is Maggie who longs for her husband’s affection, who actually begs him

to love her. She is so infatuated with him that, though he rejects her, and demonstrates

his aversion to her, she never considers leaving him for someone else. As she struggles

with her feelings she tells Brick:

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? (892)

By emphasizing Maggie’s admiration of Brick’s good looks, Williams directs the

audience’s attention towards Brick; his masculinity and secret charm, giving the reader a

hint that it is a gay male that is admired and desired. As Shackelford asserts:

While Maggie gazes on her beloved Brick’s body, the audience itself is so
directed. Through her character Williams eroticizes Brick and thus centers
the play on gay male subjectivity. (1998, 108)

Additionally, all of the other characters’ concerns in the play are focused on Brick.

Shackelford claims that the playwright clearly aims to center the action on the closeted

gay character and thus underline his own homosexual desire towards the protagonist:

20
 In Cat Brick is clearly eroticized. His masculine appearance appeals to the
gay playwright; to the audience ...; to Skipper who is homoerotically
attracted to Brick; and to Maggie who constantly begs him to sleep with
her. (1998, 108)

Such artistic manipulations of the reader’s point of view and the shaping of a male

character as the subject of common desire allow Williams to subtly and inconspicuously

bring in the question of same sex love.

To create a gay subtext legible for discerning readers and his gay audience, and

discuss homosexual issues so unspeakable for a gay community in the Cold War era

Williams intertwines into his early plays references and symbols of male homosexuality.

Among them are peripheral characters who invoke gay issues. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

there are two gay male lovers that are repetitively mentioned: Jack Straw and Peter

Ochello. Although absent, they seem to be vital figures in the play. They are previous

owners of the plantation whose bedroom is now significantly occupied by Brick and

Maggie. Their bed is always exposed in the centre of the scene thus acting as a symbol

and reference to homoerotic love (Clum, E-source). The playwright obviously wanted to

emphasize the uniqueness of this relationship and make the memory of the gay couple

present and meaningful throughout the play. As one can read in the notes for the

designer:

It [the room] 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 room must
evoke some ghosts; it is gently and poetically haunted by a relationship
that must have involved a tenderness which was uncommon. (880)

21
Jack Straw and Peter Ochello are mentioned many times in the play to hint at both

Brick’s and Big Daddy’s homosexual past. When the father and the son face each other

and have an honest conversation, Big Daddy is trying to convince Brick that the

experience of male gay love is nothing to be ashamed of. He disapproves of his son

calling gay men “sissies” and “dirty old men” and teaches him about the importance of

tolerance. Although it is hard to read that message as it is veiled in silence, Big Daddy

confesses his own homosexual experience. He says that he ”knocked around in [his]

time” (947). The playwright instructs in the stage directions: “The following scene

should be played with great consternation, with most of the power leashed but palpable

in what is left unspoken” (945) and in that scene Big Daddy confesses:

(leaving a lot unspoken):—I seen all things and understood all of them,
till 1910. Christ, the year that— I had worn my shoes through, hocked
my— I hopped off a yellow dog freight car half a mile down the road,
slept in a wagon of cotton outside the gin— Jack Straw an’ Peter Otchello
took me in. (945)

Big Daddy suggests to his son that the gay couple took care of him but it was not an

ordinary contract between them. Before that time he thought he had seen and understood

everything, but then when he started living and working on the Straw and Ochello’s

plantation he confronted something new to him, something that he leaves unspoken.

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof there is one other telling symbol of homosexuality—the

bowel cancer. In fact, the disease appears to be a code for gay male promiscuity in a few

of Williams’s works. Robert J. Corber stresses that “In Williams’s work bowel cancer is

a recurrent trope,” and it is always an ailment of the homosexually active or a symptom

of “repression of anal eroticism” (121). Bowel cancer reappears in later plays such as The

Mysteries of Joy Rio and short stories such as Hard Candy and confirms the symbolism

22
hidden behind it. As the recurrence of the trope has been recognized by critics, Big

Daddy’s bowel cancer is often interpreted as either the outcome of his homosexual past

or his ‘desire to repress his homosexuality’ (121). Brick’s brother describes Big Daddy’s

disease: “it’s poisoning of the whole system due to the failure of the body to eliminate its

poisons” (968). The above citation may evidence Williams’s intention to associate the

idea of homosexual repression with the cancer of bowels; it suggests that homosexuality

is a sort of poison which when held back and kept in secret causes the gay person to fall

into a physical and emotional decline.

A short one-act Auto-Da-Fe, on the other hand, constitutes a powerful

commentary on the long standing history of rejection and repression of homoeroticism,

which at the same time touches on the age-long problem of the acceptance of one’s own

gayness. First of all, the title is an allusion to a widely practiced punishment in the times

when homosexuality was met by capital punishment. In theory—auto-da-fe meant an act

of faith, in practice—a public ritual of burning at the stake. The title is significant; as it

constitutes a foreshadowing of what is going to happen in the play as well as a reference

to the penance executed on homosexuals back in the medieval times. Eloi, being a

closeted, self-loathing homosexual punishes himself for being gay, burns himself to

death—executes an auto-da-fe on his own self. This suicidal act stands for his longing for

retribution, for purification, and a sort of redemption, and thus might point to the

mentioned act of faith. When Eloi sees the photograph of two naked men, he discovers

the homosexual desire in himself; he immediately feels guilty and corrupted by the sin

which he so strongly deplores in others. As an exceptionally prudish person, he

recognizes his feelings as evil; consequently he cannot bear them, starts behaving like a

‘fanatic’(363), and feels the urge for purgation. Eloi’s act of self-burning references the

23
psychological phenomenon of self-denial among homosexual people. Williams

comments here on a common emotional withdrawal of gay men from society.

Auto-Da-Fe is riddled with symbols and references to homosexual experience

like no other Williams’s pre-Stonewall play. The playwright uses specific diction and

epithets to signify the way in which the contemporary world and society are perceived by

the main character who is a self-loathing gay. Eloi’s description’s of the quarter where he

lives with his mother are fraught with words like ‘filth’, ‘evil’, ‘decay’, ‘disorder’,

‘corruption’, ‘fetid swamp’, ‘degeneracy’, ‘decadence’ (362). Eloi, in a sudden outburst

of emotion exclaims that the Quarter should be ‘razed’, ‘torn down’, ‘condemned’

‘demolished’ ‘purified with fire’ (363). The words ‘burning’, ‘flames’ ‘fire’ and

‘purification’ are multiple in the play (364). It is clear that Eloi is disgusted this place and

the people living there, yet he himself appears to be part of this world. He sounds like a

fanatic; his agitated behavior described previously in this paper, his inexplicable health

conditions, and ultimately his act of burning himself imply that he feels that he himself is

the one to be condemned.

In Auto-Da-Fe, Williams discusses the homosexual heritage of rejection and

condemnation also through the meaningful reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. Eloi

criticizing the Quarter says: “All through the Scriptures are cases of cities destroyed by

the justice of fire when they got to be nests of foulness!” (363). It is palpable that Eloi

means the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah which are thought to have been

destroyed for their practice of sodomy.

The next motif, present in almost all the early plays written by Williams, is ‘the

closet’—the term widely used in the field of queer studies and the trope very

characteristic of gay literature. Dean Shackelford explains it as:

24
 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. (2000, 136)

As it was not, until some time ago, socially acceptable to display gay behaviour or to be

gay, hiding this fact and confining oneself to ‘the closet’ became a commonplace way of

life for homosexuals. This phenomenon is clearly pictured in the plays of Tennessee

Williams, and though it might be difficult to notice for theater goers or amateur readers

of his plays, ‘the closet’ is widely discussed as a major trope of his writing. Among the

critiques who analyze Williams’s plays through the lens of queer studies, it is Dean

Shackelford who asserts:

The ‘closets’ of human experience are very much part of the theatre and
most especially the plays of Tennessee Williams. In each of his plays the
most thoroughly operative trope is the ‘closet’... Williams’s characters
inhabit closets in the space of the mind and body, in both physical and
psychological space. (2000, 136)

The Little Man from The Strangest Kind of Romance, the most evidently closeted

gay character in Williams’s early plays, hides in the closet both physically and

symbolically. He lives in a boarding room, a setting typical of and recurring in

Williams’s writing; the one that is indicative of isolation from the outside world and that

appears to stand for the protection of the closet. The Little Man feels insecure and

vulnerable. His identity problems are at the same time his secrets. A gay reading of the

text allows the reader to think that the character is a homosexual who is unable to

conceive of his own sexuality and who hides that secret from others. Consequently, he

escapes from reality and from other people. The boarding room is his hideout, he can

25
only feel safe alone, hidden in the closet of the rented room. When questioned by overly

inquisitive landlady about his peculiar lifestyle, he confides what seems to be his

problem but only indirectly. He confesses how he feels about his carnality and expresses

his need for privacy, for being alone and away from other people:

The body is only—a shell. It may be alive—when what’s inside—is too

afraid to come out! It stays locked up and alone! Single! Private! That’s
how it is—with me. (146)

The citation implies that the Little Man is a closeted homosexual, he wants his life to be

private, he wants to hide in his closet of protection, to be unseen.

In Auto-Da-Fe the motif of the closet and the setting that corresponds with it

reappear. The main character, Eloi lives in a rooming house owned by Miss Bordelon. As

one learns reading the early plays by Williams, boarding rooms seem to pose hideouts for

self-repressing, closeted homosexuals; the rooms conceal their secrets. Eloi is obsessed

about his privacy; he keeps speculating that Miss Bordelon regularly searches his room

and goes through his private belongings. He is afraid that somebody might find out about

his secret and metaphorically open his closet. Moreover, the name of the owner of the

boarding house—Miss Bordelon—suggests the word “bordello” (Shackelford, 50) and

implies corruption that is present in the boarding house, and which constitutes the main

destructive force for Eloi in the play, something he wants to escape from. This language

game used by the playwright defines Eloi’s dilemma; he feels an urge to escape from his

own closet, from his secrets that literaly torment his soul and body. He cannot bear this

situation any more. He is disgusted not only by what he considers to be degeneracy of

others but also by his own. Therefore, he commits suicide.

26
 The motif of the closet is also conspicuous in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The main

character Brick hides in a psychological closet which he intentionally creates for himself.

He builds his closet by immersing himself in silence and alcoholic oblivion, by alienating

himself from the outside world and withdrawing from emotional bonds. Brick does not

let anybody close to him, not even his wife or his father who sincerely want to help him.

He states conditions on which he agrees to stay with Maggie, yet as she notices, their

coexistence is nothing like marriage; they do not live with each other, they just “occupy

the same cage” (895). Brick builds a wall to separate himself from other people. Dean

Shackelford argues that Brick’s name signifies “callousness, repressed emotion, and

stubbornness” and assumes that Brick “is, after all, like a brick wall whom no one ...

could penetrate” (1998, 109). To present the closetedness and self-repression of the

potentially gay character, Tennessee Williams used the stylistic figure called

charactonym; he chose such a name for the character that would denote his

characterological complexity.

The last matter to be mentioned in the section concerning artistic devices is the

motif of self-destruction. This motif, running through almost all Williams’s pre-

Stonewall plays, is crucial for noticing and understanding the veiled homosexual

discourse in Williams’s early creativity. The actual or potential homosexual characters

discussed so far: Brick and Skipper from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Little Man from The

Strangest Kind of Romance, Eloi from Auto-Da-Fe, and Allan from A Streetcar Named

Desire display different kinds of self-destructive behaviours. Brick’s dearest friend

Skipper kills himself as he discovers he is gay. Brick, after the death of his friend

submerges himself into alcoholic oblivion, cutting himself off from his family as he has

no motivation to live a normal life. Both of them surrender to self-destruction. Little

Man, always nervous and withdrawn from the outside world, lives a life of a

27
psychological and existential marasmus. The only relation that he sustains is with his cat

Nitchevo, with whom he becomes unreasonably infatuated. His alienation makes him

lose his job and a place to stay, and he eventually ends up deprived of everything he has,

even his cat. Eloi’s fanatical prudishness, uncompromised condemnation of sin and

immoral behaviour evokes in him such a strong feeling of guilt that it becomes

impossible for him to deal with it. His exaggerated morality turns against him and as a

result causes him to commit suicide. Allan, although only mentioned in the play, also

kills himself probably because of self-destructive thoughts of guilt caused by the

awareness of the fact that being gay is not accepted in society.

The first chapter of this study stresses the fact that the author approached the

matter of homosexuality very early in his career, in the times when that matter was a

social taboo, when being gay was socially unacceptable and coming out jeopardized

people’s professional and social lives. Although inexplicitly, Williams discusses the

issues of homoerotic love even in his public dramatic writing—in his pre-Stonewall

plays. The main point illustrated in this section is the regularity of literary devices and

techniques that the playwright applied to convey the gay meanings between the lines.

They include the particular methods of presenting the characters, literary motifs, figures

and also artistic ploys used to manipulate the readers’ point of view.

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 CHAPTER II

Open, Half-open and Ambiguous presentations of Homoeroticism in

the Later Plays and Short Stories of Tennessee Williams

The early plays by Tennessee Williams, written in the forties and fifties,

addressed homosexual themes in a very secretive manner due to the social policy

oppressing gay people and public figures at that time, and owing to the prejudice against

homosexuality still deeply rooted in the consciousness of American citizens. His short

stories, on the other hand, were much more suggestive and at times fairly

straightforward as they were exposed to smaller audiences than his plays (Prono, 292).

They constituted a literary refuge for Williams: whereas he could not deal openly with

the issues of homosexuality in his early plays—because if he had, most certainly the

plays would not have been staged—he could discuss homoerotism in his short stories

without fear of stirring public opinion.

The mood of the public, however, was becoming more and more favorable for

gay people in the sixties. In 1969 the situation dramatically changed: the Stonewall riot

in New York laid foundations for the gay liberation movement. Homosexuals who

were, so far, pushed to the margins of society, who were compelled to keep their

lifestyles in secret, could finally speak for themselves. Gay people gained the right to

live full lives, to reveal themselves as homosexuals without facing repressions and to

29
share their stories and concerns without the necessity of hiding their homosexuality.

This breakthrough in gay history allowed many authors, artists and public figures not

only to come out of the closet but also to approach homoerotic themes in their works

without restraint. Also Tennessee Williams, who had never admitted nor denied his

homosexuality, made a public disclosure soon after the Stonewall event, in 1970 during

the David Frost Show. Discussing homosexuality in public became acceptable and his

career was no longer at stake. Short stories ceased to be the only genre that allowed

Williams to address the issues that he had only hinted at in his early dramas. Already in

the early sixties also his plays finally presented gay characters with their controversial

lifestyles, and pictured their personalities and problems as those of gay men. It is his

short stories though, that are acknowledged and appreciated by critics as significant

pieces of gay literature. In his short fiction, Williams manifested gay sensibility in a

much broader scope than in his plays.

The following chapter is intended to demonstrate Williams’s techniques of

presenting gay themes and analyze his treatment of homosexuality in the short stories

and later plays.

2.1 Short stories

The division of Tennessee Williams’s work into public and private writing made

by some critics (Corber, 114) seems to be justified when comparing the treatment of

homosexuality in the author’s plays and short stories. As it was stated before, Williams

applies a plethora of artistic devices in his early dramas in order to conceal the gay

discourse, but in his ‘private’ short stories he boldly introduces a gay protagonist and

presents his emotional and sexual life. Nevertheless, that division turns out to be a mere

30
simplification of Williams’s approach to the issues of homosexuality. Whereas it is

evident that in his short stories he discusses the theme, he remains equivocal in its

treatment to the extent that some critics still accuse him of an inability to accept his own

homosexuality and of internalized homophobia (Clum, 166). What is usually

disregarded by critics is that being enigmatic and not direct is Williams’s most

distinctive technique (Salska, 238). The playwright never intended to write exclusively

for his gay audience and therefore did not want to discuss homosexual issues in a clear,

straightforward way. He himself once declared that:

You still want to know why I don't write a gay play? I don't find it
necessary. I could express what I wanted to express through other means.
I would be narrowing my audience a great deal. I wish to have a broad
audience because the major thrust of my work is not sexual orientation,
it's social. I'm not about to limit myself to writing about gay people.
(qtd. in Clum, 2000, 135)

In his short fiction, Williams usually plays with a perspective of the reader; very often

presenting the gay character as a gross, bodily corrupted old man who evokes disgust.

Yet, a closer reading reveals that Williams is nowhere near homophobia or

denouncement—he is being cynical. As Reed Woodhouse states, “Williams the narrator

enacts the role of a prude: indeed it is one of his greatest and most common disguises”

(45). He is provocative with his naturalistic and often outrageous descriptions of gay

cruising in order to create certain reactions in his readers, to make allusions—not to

present his own ideas.

The writer describes homosexual relationships and discusses common problems

of gay people such as loneliness and a need of compassion but at the same time presents

consternating images from a life of a lonely homosexual that would not have been

31
acceptable on Broadway. Williams’s short stories openly address homoeroticism but

still remain ambiguous: they employ plenty of symbols and codes of the gay subculture.

Additionally, the author, by being secretive and evasive, comments on the issues of

disclosure in the Cold War America. As Robert J. Corber argues:

The obscurity of Williams’s language reduces the reader to engaging in

the sort of reading practices that negotiating the male gay subculture
often necessitated in the Cold War era. (108)

There are two short stories written by Williams in the space of more than 10 years

which present these different treatments of homosexuality. In 1941 the author wrote

“The Mysteries of the Joy Rio,” and in 1954 its variation, the story titled “Hard Candy.”

In the first one, Williams introduces, for the first time, an explicitly homosexual

protagonist and describes the relationship of a gay couple and its qualities that

uninitiated readers are not familiar with. He also tells a story of their genuine

commitment to each other, but at the same time reveals “sad and lonely things” (102)

that the characters engage in—practices considered outrageous in a straight society.

The protagonist of the story is Pablo Gonzales, who as a 19 year-old-boy comes to the

city and meets his future lover and protector: “a very strange and fat man of German

descent named ... Emiel Kroger” (99). Mr. Kroger becomes instantly fascinated with

Pablo’s charm, with his “lustrous dark grace” (99) and takes care of him, making him

his co-worker and life partner. When presenting the characters, Williams stresses the

contrast between the young vital beauty of Pablo and the declining physical condition of

Mr. Kroger. Emiel is old and fat, his partner, on the other hand, young, slim and

charming. These descriptions seem to lead us behind the scenes of the gay male

subculture of which it is typical that an older man takes a younger, attractive boy as a

32
lover and protégée, and bequeaths his possessions on him. The youth, in return, admires

his protector for his wisdom and experience, and appreciates the care and affection. One

can observe here an ideal of gay male love; a distinctive motif in queer literature and

culture. Such a model of homosexual love was famously advocated by Socrates among

his pupils, and by Oscar Wilde in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

The relationship that Williams presents in “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”

constitutes a reference to a “hom(m)o-sexual economy of desire” (Corber, 120): an

exchange of sexual favours for material goods, money or inheritance. It is a

characteristic of homosexual relationships and cruising, and has also become a common

feature of literary renderings of gay male desire. In Williams, this motif already appears

in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the relationship of Big Daddy with Straw and Ochello but

most significantly it is distinctive for the author’s stories. Here, in “The Mysteries of the

Joy Rio,” the economy of desire is central to the plot; not only the relationship of Mr.

Kroger and Pablo is based on this kind of exchange, but also sexual favours that they

seek to comfort themselves in their lonely lives are based on such transactions as well.

Before Pablo appeared in Emiel Kruger’s life, the older man regularly visited the

decayed cinema called Joy Rio, where in the upper, closed reaches of the theater he

could find young boys willing to offer sexual pleasure in exchange for something else.

David Savran states in his book Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: the politics

of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams that it is difficult to

rationalize against the accusations of homophobia in “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”

(77). He notices that homosexual desire in this story is inescapably clandestine and

closet, “malignant”, “diseased” and “deathly” (77). However, these elements are

constant for both Williams’s fiction and drama, and while there have appeared voices of

gay critics accusing the playwright of being homophobic in his writing, his cryptic and

33
elusive literary techniques are more and more often appreciated as perfectly apt for

illustrating society’s approach to homosexuality and the atmosphere of secrecy that was

inherent to the reality of the reactionary Cold War America. In “Mysteries of the Joy

Rio” Williams uses a narrative structure which resembles an act of disclosure, a slow

and careful uncovering of a delicate truth that would bewilder many people, especially

in the oppressively straight America of that time. At the beginning of the story, the

author offers only a subtle hint concerning the kind of lifestyle Mr. Kroger has led

before he meets Pablo Gonzales:

For as I have noticed already, Mr. Kroger was a fat and strange man,
subject to the kind of bewitchment that the graceful young Pablo could
cast. The spell was so strong that it interrupted the fleeting and furtive
practices of a lifetime in Mr. Kroger. (98-99)

It is impossible for the readers to know what these “fleeting and furtive practices” (99)

are, yet for the gay readers of this text the code used here is obvious: what is meant is

homosexual cruising. Mr. Kroger has been a lonely homosexual who has sought random

sexual pleasures with other men. Thus, Williams endows Mr. Kroger with a secret

which he will be slowly disclosing to his readers. As the story progresses he reveals

more and more sensitive things about both characters. One learns that the old man is

suffering from a fatal bowel disease, which in Williams’s work is a signifier of a gay

male promiscuity and constitutes another crucial element in a queer reading of his

works. When Mr. Kroger dies, Pablo Gonzales inherits material things from him but

also the disease and the style of life that his protector lived before meeting Pablo:

He had also come into custody of his old protector’s fleeting and furtive
practices in dark places, the practices which Emiel Kroger had given up

34
 only when Pablo had come into his fading existence. The old man had
left Mr. Gonzales the full gift of his shame, and now Mr. Gonzales did
the sad and lonely things that Mr. Kroger had done for such a long time
before his one lasting love came to him. (101-102)

After the death of Mr. Kruger, Pablo Gonzales undertakes the sort of lifestyle that his

protector lived before Pablo—“his one lasting love”—came to him (102). He adopts the

alienation of a gay man, thus becoming an alter ego of Mr. Kroger and of any other

closeted homosexual in the straight and conservative society of that time.

In “Mysteries of Joy Rio,” in the course of the ‘narrative’ disclosure, Williams

slowly uncovers more details about the clandestine practices of Mr. Kroger and Pablo

Gonzales. The reader can now follow the lonely protagonist, under the cover of night, to

the old, third rate cinema where he goes regularly as did his late life companion in the

past:

Always in the afternoons when the light had begun to fail ... Mr.
Gonzales automatically rose from his stooped position ... took off his
close-seeing glasses ... and took to the street. He did not go far and he
always went in the same direction, across town toward the river where
there was an old opera house, now converted into a third-rate cinema,
which specialized in the showing of cowboy pictures and other films of
the sort that have a special appeal to children and male adolescents. The
name peculiar enough but nowhere near so peculiar as the place itself.
(101)

The author feeds the readers’ curiosity with small bits of information, allowing them to

make certain assumptions and to sense an imminent disclosure. For instance, the fact

that the cinema is a hot spot for young boys offers a thought that Pablo Gonzales attends

35
the cinema to bribe and seduce them. The author, as it is typical of him, never uncovers

the truth directly. Savran comments on this technique saying that,

[Williams] draws attention to those conventions of decorum during the

1950s that prevented a full disclosure, demanding that discourse, when
homosexuality is the “gross element” in question, must proceed by
”some measure of obscurity or indirection.” (114)

One of the objectives of this disclosure shaped story might be to prompt the reader to

interpret the codes and to analyze the structure, to arrive at the conclusion that the

elements of these stories characterize the functioning of a homosexual in the prejudiced

society; homosexuals could not reveal themselves during the McCarthy’s era, they had

to reproduce and read the codes of gay male subculture to be considered as ordinary

citizens and thus to be safe from repressions.

Williams finishes the story by reintroducing late Mr. Kroger who awaits sick and

old Pablo in the dark and dubious parts of the Joy Rio. When they meet, Mr. Kroger

warns Pablo to be cautious in pursuing the caresses of young and beautiful:

Don’t ever be so afraid of being lonely that you forget to be careful.

Don’t forget that you will find it sometimes but other times you won’t be
lucky, and those are the times when you have got to be patient, since
patience is what you must have when you don’t have luck. (109)

This last scene supports an argument that the author comments in his short story on the

issues of secrecy that were inherent to lives of homosexual people in the Cold War era.

Williams closes the narrative pointing to the common dilemma of gay people, who

36
though haunted by loneliness are unable to live normal emotional and sexual lives as

there exist social demands that dictate the necessity to stay in the closet.

The next short story to be analyzed in this study is “One Arm,” written in the

late 1940s. In this narrative again homosexual discourse prevails. Williams continues to

demonstrate the relation between a gay individual and society, but this time he applies

far more controversial imagery; here the homosexual desire is valorized, poeticized, and

subverted through the use of gothic topoi such as darkness, despair and violence.

Homosexual and homophobic discourses intertwine; in “One Arm,” as Brian M. Peters

notices: “Williams presents the homosexual as a modern monster, ostracized from

society and destined to destruction and consumption” (E-source).

The author tells a story of Olivier Winemiller, a male prostitute, who once was a

successful boxer but a car accident which caused him to lose his right arm ruined his

career. Now Olivier is a hustler, a very handsome and attractive one but also angry and

distressed; losing a limb made him lose “the center of his being” (176). The climax of

the narrative is the murder that Olivier commits on a rich man that engaged him to act in

a pornographic movie. Olivier, feeling humiliated after playing in the movie, decides to

take vengeance on the producer. After some time, the police arrest the youth, he is taken

to court and sentenced to the electric chair. The focal part of the story is Olivier’s

waiting for death and his emotional change after he receives letters from his former

clients who express their appreciation and gratitude to him.

In “One Arm” homoeroticism is primarily embodied by the figure of the

protagonist who resembles “a broken statue of Apollo,” (175) and is indeed as

good-looking and alluring as the god himself. The author uses here a meaningful simile

of the protagonist to the ancient god, aiming to emphasize the character’s beauty, but

also alluding to the times of antiquity when same sex love was socially accepted. In this

37
story Williams strongly emphasizes the carnality of the character, not only by “forcing

of our eyes in that direction” but also by mutilating Olivier which “makes his carnal

charisma all the more magnetic” (Woodhouse, 39). From the very beginning of the

story, the protagonist is presented as a man of exceptional beauty, an “unforgettable

youth” (175) possessing the irresistible “charm of the defeated” (182). Williams draws

the reader’s attention to Olivier’s attractiveness, thus building up the eroticism of the

story; the gaze of the author and of the audience is cast upon the very desirable male

protagonist. Later on when Olivier, staying in his death cell, reads the numerous letters

from his clients who have not been able to forget him and who proclaim gratitude to and

love for him, the reader’s interest is again directed towards the protagonist’s charm and

charisma. The minister who pays Olivier a visit in the prison also functions as a transfer

of desire towards the gay character. He comes to see Olivier because of some

unexplained and overpowering compulsion that makes him feel nervous and

confounded when he encounters the “virile but tender beauty” (183) of the youth.

Sexual tension is palpable in this scene:

He [the minister] found Olivier seated on the edge of his cot senselessly
rubbing his bare foot. He wore only a pair of shorts and his sweating
body radiated warmth that struck the visitor like a powerful spotlight.
(184)

The first glimpse of the youth reminds the Reverend of his childhood fantasy. He was

once fascinated with a wild animal and visited it regularly at the zoo. The obsession was

so strong that it made him pity the animal’s imprisonment and feel the “unfathomable

longing that moved through all of his body” (184). The enchantment with the wild

panther even entered his dreams in an inappropriate and embarrassing way:

38
 The dreamer uncurled his body from its tight position and lay
outstretched and spread-eagled in an attitude of absolute trust and
submission. Something began to stroke him ... starting at his feet but
progressing slowly up the length of his legs until narcotic touch arrived at
his loins, and then the dream had taken the shameful turn and he had
awakened burning with shame beneath the damp and aching initial of
Eros. (184-185)

When the Reverend looks Olivier in the eye for this first time, he experiences the same

feelings of a ‘shameful’ longing and desire he did in the past facing the wild panther.

During that scene, sexual tension is still getting more intense—Olivier leads to a

romantic interaction; asks the minister to rub his back and finally scares him off getting

undressed. There is no actual interaction between the two, but during this confrontation

the reader becomes aware of the fact that they indeed have much in common. They have

been bottled up, confused and embarrassed by their sexualities, but most of all they

have been alone. In this short story, Williams presents the homosexual erotic, poeticizes

it in bold and detailed descriptions, but he also stresses that it is stigmatized by

loneliness; all of the gay (or potentially gay) characters in the story feel lonely and

misunderstood—Olivier himself, his clients and finally the minister.

“One Arm,” to a considerable extent, presents an affirmative treatment of

homoeroticism. Olivier is initially angry with his fate and embittered—random

interactions with strangers mean nothing to him but money; “a place to shack up for the

night and liquor and food” (181) — but he finally realizes that he took for granted

something that could make him happy: “If I had known then, I mean when I was

outside, that such true feelings could even be found in strangers ... I guess I might have

felt that there was more to live for” (181). The youth is grateful for the letters that his

39
clients sent him for he understands that he has been important to those people and he

owes them “not money, but feelings” (187). The homoerotic desire is pictured in this

short story as a longing for a physical and emotional contact, and though it is marked

with feelings of guilt and shame, and banished to the outskirts of New Orleans for being

an immoral practice, the reader sympathizes with the abandoned and closeted gay

characters. Nevertheless, the story ends with a downfall of the queer character; there is

no official recuperation of homosexuality—Olivier comes to the end of his life on the

electric chair; dies nostalgically holding the letters received from his lovers between his

thighs.

While the homoerotic love in this narrative is not exempt from troubling

associations with deviancy, hopelessness and destruction, “One Arm” is Williams’s

next work out of many that tells a story of the defeated. The author once again sentences

his gay protagonist to death. So, though the story is openly homoerotic, unburdened

with the dense symbolicity of the early Broadway plays, the dark and vindictive fate

still seems to be inscribed in a gay character. Olivier, since the accident in which he lost

his hand, has been heading towards his destruction. He feels incomplete and inapt for

normal life; the only thing he excelled at was fighting. Now, he feels that he does not fit

in the society; there is no way he can make himself useful:

He never said to himself, I’m lost. But the speechless self knew it and in
submission to its unthinking control the youth had begun as soon as he left
the hospital to look about for destruction. (176)

Resigned and indifferent, Olivier becomes a male prostitute. The world that Williams

presents to his readers now is the one of corruption, on the outskirts of society. Olivier

treats his body as a commodity. He does not care either for himself or those who care

40
for him. His anger leads him to commit a murder, and thus he winds up sentenced to

death on the electric chair. The picture of homosexuality might seem unfavourable here.

Brian M. Peters notices that for Williams like “for many writers of the postwar decades,

stories of same sex attraction are inevitably stories of disappointment and disaster,

implying the strong cultural fear of male homosexuality in their contemporary worlds”

(Peters, E-source). “One Arm,” similarly to the story discussed previously, and in

accordance with the general features of Williams’s writing—a constant attempt to

allude to society’s approach towards homosexuality—reflects the mainstream

disapproval of homoeroticism.

As in the other short stories, also in “One Arm” there appears the question of the

economics of desire. Olivier, being unable to earn a decent living, due to his deformity,

begins to treat his body as a marketable commodity—he ‘sells’ it to support himself.

This exchange of sexual pleasure is interpreted by Steven Bruhm as a way to outlaw the

gay interaction—to push it into the margins of society (524). The mutilation that

deprived Olivier of his ‘adequacy’ for the society also robbed him of the only way to

support himself. He was a professional boxer and now he has to resort to prostitution.

This change in Olivier’s life may be read as a transition from heterosexuality to

homosexuality. What Williams might imply here is that there is no place for a gay

person in pre-Stonewall America; once one is labeled as homosexual, the opportunities

for career disappear and one faces difficulties owing to common intolerance. In the

same way Olivier “as a queer Other is forced into society’s margins, denied

“traditional” sources of income and outlets for desire, and destined to imprisonment and

execution” (Peters, E-source).

41
2.2 The Late Plays

In the times of growing discontent about the common homophobia, in the late

fifties and sixties of the twentieth century, the degree of openness in Williams’s plays

increased and his style of presentation of gay issues and characters became noticeably

defiant and thought-provoking. Nevertheless, while the late plays of Tennessee

Williams are more direct in their depictions of homosexuality than the early ones, they

lack the graphic detail and openness that accompany the short stories. In his short

fiction, the author offered exhaustive descriptions of homosexual lifestyle and

behaviour, presented images that were unequivocal. In his theatre, on the other hand, the

descriptions appear to be less powerful as the playwright usually makes them the

subject of a tale or a gossip told by one of the characters. He puts an account of certain

disturbing events in one of his character’s mouth and lets that story drive the course of

events, or at least play a vital part in it. The audience learns about outrageous facts from

the life of the protagonist but they do not witness any shocking scenes on stage. When

analyzing the playwright’s dramas, it appears clear and understandable that, when

writing for stage, Williams toned down his techniques of presentation of same-sex

desire. Because he wished for his plays to be staged, he recognized the need to comply

with the orthodox traditions of American drama. Thus, homosexual discourse is

conspicuous in the later plays, yet in a less explicit manner than in his short stories.

The discrepancy between Williams’s fiction and theatre is not only visible in the

different manifestations of desire presented to his readers but also in the quite distinct

42
moods. In his short fiction Williams uncovered the homosexual erotic through

imaginative descriptions. He added positive tones to his still disturbing depictions of

same sex desire by looking at people who seek genuine emotional bonds. The gay

characters in the short stories are likeable and evoke our sympathy. Many critics notice

that the short stories feature a fairly positive treatment of homosexuality and that this is

the genre particularly directed towards his gay audience. His plays, on the other hand,

are directed towards a much broader audience and homosexuality usually is only one of

the many issues underlying the plot. One may observe that the mood that prevails in the

later plays is definitely gloomy. They are frequently described as ‘death-centered’ or

‘outrageous’ plays. Perversion and deviancy seem inseparable from homosexuality; fear

and violence determine the fate of the protagonists. Such view of homosexuality is a

characteristic feature of Williams’s play Suddenly Last Summer (1958): a drama that is

believed to be the most revolting of all the playwright’s plays and which gives a

constant incentive for those of the critics who tend to attack Williams for his latent

homophobia (Hurley, 392).

In many of his works Williams applies the codes of homosexuality to comment

on the social homophobia in subtle ways that are noticeable only to readers who know

his recurring motifs and symbols and even in his late openly homoerotic plays he does

not resign from this technique. On the contrary; it is conspicuous that his works become

more and more fraught with multiple meanings, and quite as often they are criticized as

being “overloaded” with them (Heintzelman, 200). Thus, many coded messages are

found in Suddenly Last Summer.

The play tells the story of a decadent poet: Sebastian Venable who dies

suddenly, in mysterious circumstances which are gradually revealed to us as the play

progresses. The events of Sebastian’s life are recounted fragmentarily, in flashbacks by

43
Sebastian’s mother Violet and his cousin Catherine. The tragic incident took place

during last summer which Sabastian and Catherine spent together. The girl was present

at the scene of Sebastian’s death but her account of it is considered a fantasy by all who

have heard it. Furthermore, Catherine’s shocking report of last summer events tarnishes

Sebastian’s reputation in the society. When she confesses that Sebastian used her to

procure young attractive boys for him, that he was not creative as a poet but indecent

and promiscuous as a gay man, she is considered to be insane, and even more so when

she claims that he died being “devoured” (147) by a group of naked children. It is clear

from the beginning of the play that Mrs. Venable aims to salvage her son’s reputation

and to that end she finds it necessary to proclaim Catherine a mad person. She intends to

make her silent forever by bribing the psychiatrist to lobotomize her.

Suddenly Last Summer is bleak and morbid, and it undoubtedly presents a

disturbing vision of a gay person and homosexuality itself, but it is also Williams’s first

play so explicitly manifesting homoerotic desire in drama. As in many previous plays of

Williams, the queer protagonist is not present onstage. One may speculate about the

reasons why Williams chose to present Sebastian as an offstage character. Certainly one

explanation might be the atmosphere of secrecy pervading the times of the Cold War

era. However, the playwright ventured at presenting a largely confounding story to his

readers, of which the core elements are homosexual promiscuity and cannibalism.

Introducing Sebastian Venable to the audience, onstage, would not be a much more

daring step for Williams. Given the ample symbolicity of all of Williams’s works, one

might presume that the absence of a gay character on stage is also meaningful for the

interpretation of the play. As the author often suggested, there is no place for a

homosexual in contemporary America. A gay man is not understood, but frowned upon

and even feared. Perhaps, the shocking images of homosexual cruising and cannibalism

44
function as literary hyperboles and aim to imply the misunderstanding of the queer

culture. Since, Williams often takes on a mask of a prude, it is highly probable that also

in this case, in a truly postmodern manner, the author plays with the reactions of his

readers to show them how exaggerated the common idea about homosexuality might be.

The omnipresent motif in Williams is the sinister relationship of fear and desire

which always leads to the downfall of a character. Sebastian Venable is another of

Williams’s gay character to head for destruction and to ultimately have his untamed

desire consume him. Sebastian is a man that indulges in his drives. First, he uses his still

beautiful and lively mother to attract the objects of his desire. Then, however, it turns

out to be not satisfying enough. Sebastian becomes bored with the type of men that are

lured by the classic and mature beauty of his mother. So, he abandons her for his

stunning young cousin Catherine, who can introduce him to younger, more attractive

boys. During the holidays with Catherine in Cabeza de Lobo, Sebastian becomes more

and more determined and rash in following his desires. Ruthless towards his

increasingly worried cousin, he makes her do whatever he has planned for them.

Catherine recalls the summer days with disgust:

Cousin Sebastian said he was famished for blonds, he was fed up with
the dark ones and was famished for blonds. All the travel brochures he
picked up were the advertisements of the blond northern countries. I
think he’d already booked us to—Copenhagen or—Stockholm.—Fed up
with dark ones, famished for light ones: that’s how he talked about
people, as if they were—items on a menu—“That one is delicious
looking, that one is appetizing,” or “that one is not appetizing.” (118)

From what Catherine says, it is clear that Sebastian’s urge is insatiable. He treats the

people he desires as items on a menu. He pushes her cousin to do things that she hates

45
just to attract the attention of men on the beach where they spend their afternoons.

Talking to doctor Cukrowicz Catherine expresses her grudge:

He bought me a swim-suit I didn’t want to wear ... the water made it

transparent! I didn’t want to swim in it, but he’d grab my hand and drag
me into water, all the way in, and I would come out looking naked! (140)

Soon, Sebastian does not need to attract attention any more, he becomes noticed—

especially by the young and homeless boys from the public beach. They begin

following him everywhere he goes, and the number of them increases every day. They

come after him also to the restaurant where Sebastian and Catherine have lunch one

day, and start playing loud disturbing music. One can observe that just then Sebastian

starts feeling discomfort. He feels anxious and keeps saying that he and Catherine ought

to leave the place and go North. As Catherine describes his cousin’s disposition one

realizes that he was scared:

He kept touching his face and his throat here and there with a white
handkerchief and popping little white pills in his mouth, and I knew he
was having a bad time with his heart and was frightened of it. (142)

This scene represents a pattern that is present in many other Williams’s works—the

ailing that gains in strength when a person is frightened or conscience stricken.

Sebastian senses that there is something morbid about the people that follow him:

“Every day the crowd was bigger, noisier, greedier!” (141); he becomes scared of them

and that is why he wants to flee the place. Nevertheless, he goes after the crowd of

children despite the fear and the premonition of something ominous coming, and despite

the fact that Catherine tries to stop him. Telling this story to the Sister who accompanies

46
Catherine during the visit to Mrs. Venable’s house, she explains that this horrible

incident was unbelievable and inconceivable also to her: “Why wouldn’t he let me save

him? I tried to hold onto his hands but he struck me away and ran, ran, ran in the wrong

direction” (118). Sebastian heads towards his own destruction, towards the objects of

his fear and desire and is ultimately killed by “the band of naked children” (146).

The story told by Catherine evokes disgust and disbelief in her family.

Everybody tries to convince her to be silent about what happened in Cabeza de Lobo.

Her brother George, whose financial well-being depends on aunt Violet, tries to

convince Catherine not to recount the story of the last summer any more. He reprimands

her saying: “Even if it’s what it couldn’t be, TRUE!—You got to drop it, Sister, you

can’t tell such a story to civilized people in a civilized up-to-date country!” (122). Also

Catherine’s mother cannot understand her daughter and wonders: “Cathie, why, why,

why!—did you invent such a tale?” (122). Furthermore, Williams stresses Aunt Violet’s

morbid determination to silence the girl; Mrs. Venable decided to “cut this hideous

story out of her brain” (147). It is palpable that nobody believes in what Catherine says,

or perhaps nobody wants to believe it. Thus, from the very beginning of the play one

may observe that Suddenly Last Summer proposes a discussion of society’s

homophobia. It is considered ridiculous that a poet, a well-respected citizen may have

resorted to seducing young boys, to taking advantage of them. The atmosphere of

disbelief and indignation surrounding the story of Sebastian’s death points at Williams’s

indication of pervasive homophobia. It is assumed that Sebastian could not have been

gay because he was a decent man, because he was “c-h-a-s-t-e” (110) and that may only

suggest that a homosexual cannot be considered an honest man. It also seems clear that

if it had not been for the social prejudice against homosexuality, Sebastian would not

have needed his mother’s or cousin’s company to meet other men. As Georges-Claude

47
Guilbert stresses in his essay on the dead-queer motif in Williams’s works: “If society

had been more open-minded, Sebastian might have found love on his doorstep in New

Orleans, would not have turned into self-destructive neurotic dandy, and the play

Suddenly Last Summer would not exist. Instead, he is killed by cannibal, heterosexual,

homophobic boys” (89). This is homophobia that kills him, figuratively and literally.

Sebastian Venable paid attractive boys for their sexual favours, bought their bodies and

afterwards he was offended and menaced by them. As Catherine recalls, he said: “That

gang of kids shouted vile things about me” (146), which probably meant he could have

been called queer, degenerate or something along those lines. As a result, trying to hide

from the biased judgment of other people, he died exactly as a consequence of it; he was

slaughtered by underprivileged, homophobic boys.

Another issue that Tennessee Williams touches on in Suddenly Last Summer is

the protection of the closet; something that was vital for homosexual men living in the

United States of the fifties. This was a way to live a normal life in a prejudiced society,

ironically, in a “civilized, up-to-date country,” as Catherine’s brother puts it. A

commonly understood fact was that homosexuality was wrong; a condition to be put

under treatment. In Suddenly Last Summer, for the son and his overprotective mother,

Sebastian’s homosexuality is a private secret. Every year, they would go on holidays so

that Sebastian could realize his desires. Nobody knew about it but them, and even after

Sebastian’s death his mother endeavours to protect his secret, to defend “dead poet’s

reputation” (103). Williams highlights the fact that the reputation of the poet would be

destroyed if his homosexuality was revealed. The author aims to point to the fact that

homosexual men face a stumbling block trying to follow their careers in a prejudiced

society.

48
 The presentation of a gay protagonist in Suddenly Last Summer appears to be

analogical to a type of a gay character created by the playwright in his previous works.

Tennessee Williams offers evidence for his readers to believe the story told by

Catherine. Sebastian is an aesthete, a poet, a mama’s boy and an effete, feeble man. He

lives in the closet, wants to conceal his secret at all costs and that leads him to his

downfall. Gay characters in Williams’s works fall into self-destructive habits or let

themselves be tormented by feelings of anxiety and guilt, which brings about the state

of unhappiness and in most cases death. In order not to face the truth and the reaction of

the society, Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drinks himself into oblivion, Allan in A

Streetcar Named Desire and Eloi in Auto-Da-Fe commit suicide and Sebastian gets

killed by a mob of homophobic boys. Almost all of Williams’s closeted gay characters

develop unexplained ailments that suggest suppressed desire, and so does Sebastian

who complains about his frequent chest pains. It seems that Williams’s attempt is to say

that this is the price that has to be paid for hiding in the closet and suppressing one’s

own sexuality. Through his characters, he demonstrates that denial of one’s sexuality

generates unhappiness and distress, yet it is often the only way to be accepted in a

society.

As one may notice, Tennessee Williams often employs Freudian ideas of

neuroses being the result of a repressed desire—the body that cannot find the outlet for

its natural drives becomes sick. He also borrows from Freud by creating a very

characteristic relationship between a son and an over-protective mother—he makes use

of the classic Oedipus complex. These motifs are characteristic not only of Sebastian

and his mother; they also appear in the play The Kingdom of Earth, or Seven Descent of

Myrtle (1967), the play that tells a story of a newlywed couple—Myrtle and Lot—who

come to settle in their home in the country. When they arrive, they learn that the area is

49
soon likely to be flooded and they ought to leave to stay safe. Lot, however, neglects the

warning and refuses to leave the place. He presents his house to Myrtle, frequently

mentioning his beloved mother and the care she had given that house. He forbids Myrtle

to sit on his mother’s golden chairs and talks about her so often that Myrtle points out

that Lot has got a “mother complex.” The reader soon finds out that Lot cannot satisfy

his new wife sexually and that he suffers from tuberculosis, a disease that Myrtle did

not know about either. Lot finally reveals the true self before Myrtle saying:

You’ve married someone to whom no kind of sex relation was ever as

important as fighting sickness and trying with his mother to make, to
create, a little elegance in a corner of the earth we lived in that wasn’t
favourable to it. (656)

Lot can barely walk and he spends most of the time in bed reminiscing his mother,

while Myrtle confused over the new and unexpected circumstances, and scared of the

coming flood tries to become friends with Lot’s half-brother Chicken, soon becoming

his mistress. She learns from him that her husband is a transvestite, that “he gits in his

mother’s clothes—panties, brassiere, slippers, dress, an’ a wig he made out of cornsilk”

(696) and everyone in the area knows about it. Chicken calls his step-brother a dying

sissy, which turns out to be true in the final scene when Lot goes down the stairs

dressed in his mother clothes and dies in the parlour, in one of his mother’s little golden

chairs.

Lot is Williams’s first character to be a drag queen or a transvestite. It appears

that creating this character the playwright employed a set of stereotypes—along with

the stereotype of a mama’s boy, of effeminacy and refinement, he positioned

transvestism. He endowed Lot with qualities that are commonly associated with

50
homosexuality, and sentenced him to a pitiable and sad death. For some critics, it

becomes more and more obvious that the meaning that hides behind this pattern is the

playwright’s condemnation of homosexuality, while for others it proves that Williams

aims to demonstrate what the image of a gay man in the eyes of straight society is.

Chicken calls his half-brother sissy because a popular perception of a man who is

effeminate and cross-dresses is that he is gay. The playwright tries to destroy these

common stereotypes. As David Savran argues: “Williams equates the androgyny with

impotence while attempting carefully to detach effeminacy from homosexuality” (119).

The objective of the foregoing chapter is to illustrate the different renderings of

homosexuality in Williams’s short stories and late plays. The chapter analyses the

devices the playwright uses to convey problems that a non-standard sexual orientation

poses for gay people living in a straight society. It is argued that the characteristic

feature of Wiliams’s short stories and later plays is a more direct and bold treatment of

homoeroticism in comparison with his early dramas. The growing number of liberal

opinions about same-sex love encouraged the author to express in his plays more than

just the coded messages concerning homosexuality. From the beginning of the

playwright’s writing career, the short stories were his more candid and ‘private’ means

of expression, directed distinctly to his gay audience. Operating within these more open

modes of discourse, Williams did not resign from the codes and symbols of queer

culture that enriched his earlier creativity. One may find many recurring motifs that the

author used to signify homosexual orientation in his previous ‘closeted’ works, and

discover plenty of hinted meanings concerning gay culture also in his short fiction and

late plays.

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 CHAPTER III

Candid and Intimate Manifestations of Homoeroticism

in the Poetry of Tennessee Williams.

Tennessee Williams had created poetry since the very beginning of his writing

career, and though his verse had never been as appreciated as his drama or even as his

fiction, he primarily thought of himself as a poet. It is also in his poetry, that the author

allowed himself to deal with homoeroticism most intimately and candidly.

As it was stated in the previous chapters, mid-century America was to a

considerable extent disapproving and even contemptuous of gay people. Not only

declared homosexuals were the subjects to McCarthy’s witch-hunt and repression, but

also closeted and latent gay people. Manifesting one’s own homosexual preference was

as perilous as showing even slightest signs of effeminacy. Thus, writing about

homosexuality in fiction, let alone staging it, was virtually impossible in the United

States of the 1950s. Only in naturally symbolic and indirect poetry could one express

the forbidden matter. Therefore perhaps, one may find homoeroticism as one of the

major themes in the verse of Tennessee Williams. His poems were indeed much less

52
exposed to the public than his plays and even short stories. It is evident that the

treatment of gay issues in Williams’s work varies in these three media of expression.

Consequently, it might be argued that as the particular forms of writing received a

different scope of publicity, the author applied to them the appropriate dose of

openness. He guardedly veiled the gay meanings in his early plays, was definitely less

restrained by social conventions in his short fiction and freely voiced all of his mixed

feelings about homosexuality in his overtly gay poetry. Using lyrical verse, the

playwright explored many different aspects of homosexual love. He examined

emotional, spiritual and purely sexual spheres of it. Tennessee Williams poeticized

homosexual love but also expressed his concerns about being gay which was at his time

still an acute chagrin for many gay men in America.

Compared with Williams’s plays and short stories, his poetry is often considered

to contain his most unconstrained and in-depth treatment of homoeroticism. Admittedly,

his two collections of poetry—In the Winter of the Cities (1956) and Androgyne, Mon

Amour (1977)—treasure a number of intimate romantic love poems. One can clearly see

the author’s admiration of male sensuality and his delight with sexuality, though

intermingled with omnipresent suggestions of destructive forces of desire and sexual

guilt. As a consequence, in these poems, the narrator habitually stresses the importance

of spirituality and emotionality in gay affection. Reflecting on the nature of homoerotic

love, Williams demonstrates his appreciation of it, glorifies it but also voices

disappointments and dilemmas inherent to homosexual relationships. Furthermore, the

poet continues his social commentary that we observed in his plays and fiction. He

speaks of the sorrow of the unloved, the misunderstood and the rejected. He

sympathizes with the fugitive kinds; the spirited, isolated and maltreated homosexuals,

being at the same time far more expressive than in his plays or short stories.

53
 To begin with Williams’s most romantic depictions of gay love, and

simultaneously most intimate and private ones, one of the first poems to be analyzed is

“Little Horse.” Written in late 1940s, the short lyric was dedicated to Williams’s life

companion and partner Frank Merlo, and preceded a series of other love poems,

probably related to the playwright’s beloved friend and lover. Quoting after Christopher

Colon: “If we want to find in Williams a positive, joyous portrayal of homosexuality,

we might expect it to appear most prominently in the poems on his lover of fifteen

years, Frank Merlo” (60). In a playful tone, “Little Horse” tells a story of a romantic

encounter of two men. The lyrical I speaks tenderly of a stranger for whom he chooses

the name of Little Horse. They meet one rainy day and share an umbrella while

enjoying each other’s company. The narrator reveals his affection for the man,

confessing that meeting Little Horse was not accidental but deliberate:

Mignon he was or mignonette

avec les yeux plus grands que lui.
My name for him was Little Horse.
I fear he had no name for me.

I came upon him more by plan

than accidents appear to be.
Something started or something stopped
and there I was and there was he. (75)

Little Horse, the persona who appears in a few other Williams’s poems, is here

described in French as a mignon—a sweetheart, avec les yeux plus grands que lui—

“with eyes bigger than he is.” Thus one may notice the affection that the lyrical I feels

towards the man and observe the beginning of a relationship. The first three stanzas

54
recount the past circumstances of the couple’s blissful meeting; the last one though, is

written in the present tense and suggests that the men’s enchantment was not a

short-lived romance but a true and meaningful love. The poem, however seemingly

light-hearted, contains a note of melancholy and touches on such romantic predicaments

as need for spiritual connection and uncertainty concerning the beloved person’s

feelings. In the lyric’s closing stanza, the narrator expresses his disappointment with the

fact that his lover did not eventually invent a pet name for him:

Mignion he is or mignonette
avec les yeux plus grands que lui.
My name for him is Little Horse.
I wish he had a name for me. (76)

This poem of Williams, apparently childlike, is an in-depth reflection on

homoerotic love. The author expresses his joy of a homosexual relationship but also the

longing for closeness and affection that is often absent in gay relationships. The issue

that is at surface here, the problem of creating a genuine bond between gay lovers, was

never explored so vividly and profoundly by Williams in his plays or short stories

where the themes of homosexuality were notoriously veiled or shifted back to the

margins of the main plot. In his poetry, Williams uncovers the whole dimension of a

gay romance.

Another poem that is believed to be one of Williams’s poetic reflections on his

relationship with Frank Merlo is “A Separate Poem” (1956). It is a complex lyric

constructed of four stages—a story of a relationship that has apparently lost its vitality

and beauty. The author again contemplates gay love and reveals its quandaries,

discussing the sphere of homosexuality more profoundly than he ever could in his other

55
forms of expression. The poem appears to be the playwright’s confession and a very

thorough balance of his relationship with another man. Telling a story of a lost

affection, Williams stresses the importance of spiritual connection in a relationship and

sees its destructive power in sexual overindulgence. Using a metaphor of an island,

Williams signifies the relationship between two men. He states that the “island” has

disappeared, meaning that the bond between the two lovers has disintegrated and the

marvel of their love has been lost:

The day turns holy as though a god moved through it,

Wanderingly, unknowingly and unknown,
Led by the sky as a child is led by its mother

But the sky of an island is a wanderingly sky.

It seems bewildered sometimes, it seems bewildered as we are

Since the loss of our island.

Time took it from us (79)

One may observe that the lyrical I expresses his melancholy and disorientation caused

by the loss of the “island.” Ingrained with ‘holiness’, the island appears to stand for

something divine, dear, and fundamental to the romantic bond of the two men—it is the

beauty and joy of the relationship. Later on, the narrator suggests that, the charm of

their love wore out with time but the men continue to live by each other’s side. They

“Still/...live on the island, but more as visitors, than as residents.” The lyrical I speaks of

the loss of romantic intimacy in a sorrowful tone, yet seems to notice that the change in

mutual feelings is something inescapable. Accordingly, at the end of the first section

one reads:

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 Still we remember
Things our island has taught us: how to let the sky go...
And other things of a smaller, more intimate nature.
Our island has been a school in which we were backward pupils. (79)

The ‘sky’, here being an integral part of an ‘island’, is something that should be let go,

and so are the things “of smaller, more intimate nature.” It might be argued that

Williams asserts here that there are some moments of greatness, of paramount love,

associated perhaps with physical love, that pass with time and one should not become

frustrated, for this is a natural turn of events. In this first part of the poem, Williams’s

reflection on homoerotic love is to a greater extent universal and preoccupied with

emotions rather than with carnality; exploring the theme of waning love, the author

manages to observe its elusive charm and the destructive power of time. One should

note here the author’s sincere engagement in the theme of homosexuality. In a much

personal and candid tone, Williams touches on aspects of homoeroticism that escape the

attention of audiences of his theatre—he manifests a homosexual longing for genuine

affection, for a long-lasting relationship as a very basic condition of happiness.

In the second part of the poem, Williams uncovers the allure of a male body and

the intensity of homosexual desire. Here, the lyrical I centers his attention specifically

on the sexual aspects of the relationship. At first, he glorifies the carnality of his partner:

You put on the clothes of a god which was your naked body
... your back
turned to me, showing no sign that you knew that you were

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 building an island: then came to rest, fleshed
in a god’s perfection beside me. (80)

The narrator compares his lover’s naked body to a god’s image. Describing his

perfection, he recounts the moments of the beginning of their relationship; the moments

of building their island which was also the time of overindulging in their sexual desires.

Hence, there also appears a regret of sexual promiscuity; the narrator seems to blame

their excessive preoccupation with carnality for the disintegration of their relationship.

As he confesses:

Even then,
I knew that to build an island is not to hold it always,
but longing was so much stronger, yes, even stronger
than the dread of not holding, always.

Perhaps it would have been better if I had touched only your hand,
or only leaned over your head and clasped it all the night through.
But longing was so much stronger. . . . (80)

The lyrical I reflects on the past, declaring that his lust for sexual pleasure was far

stronger than his fear of destroying the bond between him and his lover. He realizes that

what caused their love to lose its true value was deficiency of affection and inwardness,

and too much lewdness in their relationship. Tennessee Williams stresses here the

importance of spirituality in the romantic relation between two people. He denounces

the absorption with sexual pleasure, perhaps suggesting that homosexual relationships

are often empty, uncommitted and casual arrangements between men. It is significant

that, in his poetic verse, Williams finally expresses his thoughts about gay sexuality

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without any restraint. Whereas he never discussed the problem so candidly in his theatre

or short fiction, in the poem he boldly comments on the fact that sexual drives often

take control over the reason. Stressing the powerful nature of homosexual feelings, he

demonstrates how hard it is to resist them. In his short stories and plays gay characters

often resorted to cruising to satisfy their sexual drives but the author never reflected on

their real motives and feelings. Here, in his poetry he eventually exposes the complexity

of homosexual desire.

In the third section of “A Separate Poem,” the lyrical I proceeds to describe the

deteriorating bond between the two men. He points to the fact that there happened to be

bitter moments in the history of their love but they never caused the lovers to feel tired

of their relationship. Speaking of the ominous silence between the men, the narrator

suggests that this time they are not going through another crisis but that their affection is

virtually burnt out:

Our travels ranged wide of our island but nowhere nearly so far
as our silence enters the bare and mountainous country
of what cannot be spoken.
When we speak to each other
we speak of things that mean nothing of what we meant to each
other (80)

Williams not only describes the painful silence between the men but also offers the

sense of it in the structure of his poem through enjambments that render the lyric even

more dramatic and expressive. Owing to this effect, in this part of the poem the torture

of the silence and the feeling of their dying love become distinctly palpable. Here, as the

narrator speaks of the “small things”—courteous phrases that the partners

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unemotionally exchange with each other every day, one realizes that the problem of this

gay couple is again one that bothers millions of other people:

Small things
gather about us as if to shield our vision from a wild landscape
untouched by the sun and yet blindingly lighted.
We say small things to each other
in quiet, tired voices, hoarsened as if by shouting across a great
distance.

We say small things to each other carefully, politely,

Such as:
Here’s the newspaper, which part of it do you want?
Oh, I don’t care, any part but the funnies or ads..... (80-81)

Love quandaries as presented in this poem turn out to be again largely universal. The

lovers are no longer happy with each other—they are “untouched by the sun and yet

blindingly lighted.” Their love has burnt out, but still they fear to part, deluding and

“blinding” themselves with small courtesies and trivial everyday conversations. As in

every other relationship, the silence for the men is worse than arguments and verbal

violence for it covers grudges and bitterness and leads to something catastrophic—

“crash, fire, demolition,” and the lyrical I realizes that:

But under the silence of what we say to each other,

Is the much more articulate silence of what we don’t say to each
Other,
A storm of things unspoken,
Coiled, reserved, appointed
Ticking away like a clock attached to a time-bomb:

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 Crash, fire, demolition
Wound up in the quietly,
almost tenderly,
small, familiar things spoken. (81)

The verses presented so far testify to Williams’s openness in dealing with the issue of

homosexuality. It must be emphasized encore that author exhibits the very intimate

spheres of homoeroticism and love life of gay men. Nowhere else in his writing did he

touch on such delicate emotional questions as here in his poetry.

In the last section of the poem, the narrator once again nostalgically reminisces

about the love that the couple used to rejoice. Recalling their travel to Bangkok, the

lyrical I contemplates the two completely different images of divinity that they

encountered on their way and translates them into the elusive spirituality that the men

once were able to achieve in their relationship. The first godly image was found in the

temple of the Emerald Buddha where one could find: “a table bearing a laughable

assortment of western/ gadgets” and the Emerald Buddha himself, presented as

“disconcertingly small,/ not glistening but glazed,/ ...sitting there to be visited and

observed by travellers/ tired of travel, tourists tired of touring” (81). This iconic

representation of Buddha was judged by the lovers as tacky and superficial and as

nothing that could bring one closer to god. The Emerald Buddha symbolized the

earthliness of human needs. The true image of god, says the narrator, could only be

found in the genuine emotional bond between people. As he recounts the journey he

recalls the moment when the two of the partners could feel something close to divinity:

It was the long , slow, golden-hazed boat trip

through the canals of Bangkok

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 that gave us a sense of reverence for something:
the shacks on stilts of bamboo, the ancient women, breasts drooping
bathing their grandsons in the warm tawny water as if paying them
homage
as loving as it was humble: this, only this,
spoke to us of the limitless range and simplicity of a god, just
this, not the Emerald Buddha in his funnily tacky pavilion. . . . (82)

Williams seems to communicate here that spirituality in love can only be found in

devotion and mutual appreciation of each other. He demonstrates that such moments as

this trip through the canals of Bangkok made the lovers feel the “reverence for

something” and experience joy of being together. Again he seems to blame the

preoccupation with earthly aspects of their relationships, such as sexuality, for losing

the real value of their bond, for he says that it is “the water of islands and the sky of

islands,” which stand for carnal aspects of their relationship, that draw them back from

creating a real bond with each other. The lyrical I explains that because there was

nothing spiritual about their relationship, their love wore out:

The water of islands and the sky of islands

Are what draw back to us
The visiting god that wanders, unable to speak any language
But that of stillness and radiance outside our windows.

Later, all dims, and nothing is asked past our measure;

The evening of our island
Is simple as the question: What shall we have for supper
And answer: What would you like for supper?
In voices turned softer by love’s exhaustion and hate’s.

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 A true god’s image, unless it is drawn by god,
(and I doubt they pose for each other)
is better drawn in such quick, light pencil-scratches. . . . (82)

In the last lines of the poem, Tennessee Williams concludes that the ideal of love is

found in short and elusive moments of mutual happiness “drawn in such quick, light

pencil-scratches,” yet these are moments of spiritual exultation as opposed to carnal

pleasures. The author ultimately states that the nurturing of spirituality is a

indispensable condition of a happy relationship.

“A Separate Poem” proves to be a clear-sighted study of gay love, where

Williams delves deeply into a homosexual relationship to contemplate its beauty and

fragility. In the quoted poem, homoerotic love turns out to be not different from

heterosexual love for it is equally precious and heart-breaking. One will not encounter

here any codes or evasiveness that are so typical for the author’s dramatic or fictional

writing. The author exposes here the most intimate aspects of homoeroticism in an

unreserved and openhearted manner.

Williams’s poems, unlike his other writings, voice a whole spectrum of different

emotions associated with homoeroticism. The author expresses his delight with sex as

well as confusion and perplexity about love and its different experiences. In the poem

titled “You and I” the narrator ponders upon the transitory love affair that exists

between him and his lover:

Who are you?

A surface warm to my fingers,
a solid form, an occupant of space,
a makeshift kind of enjoyment,
a pitiless being that runs away like water

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 something left unfinished, out of inferior matter,

Something god thought of.

Nothing, sometimes everything,
Something I cannot believe in,
A foolish argument, you, yourself, not I,
An enemy of mine. My lover (123)

In this poem the relationship between the lovers appears to be a short-living romance,

something elusive, undefined and uncertain. It seems both exciting and scary as the

lover of the lyrical I is at the same time his enemy. The men feel passion for each other

but are also able to hurt each others’ feelings. Williams sketches a moment in a

romantic experience of a gay man but one can recognize a deeply personal load in it.

Alluding to his past life difficulties, perhaps romantic disappointments the narrator

proceeds saying: “Who am I?/ A wounded man, badly bandaged .../A box of questions

shaken up and scattered on the floor.../ An enemy of yours. Your lover” (123).

Williams devoted many of his poems to his personal relationships; he reflected

on his long-lasting engagements, on his genuine emotional commitments but also on

one-night stands with strangers. In many of his lyrics, the author confessed that random

sexual encounters are for a gay man something inherent in a homosexual lifestyle.

Nevertheless, he never denounced such practices; on the contrary, he often shrouded

them in the atmosphere of exclusiveness and metaphysics. “The Siege” is one of such

poetic pictures of homosexual cruising. The narrator of the poem, feeling great sexual

craving, describes the wild excitement that urges him to leave home and search for

sexual adventure. Employing the images of rushing blood and of his own restlessness,

he expresses the passion and the peril of the desire that seizes him:

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 I build a tottering pillar of my blood
to walk it upright on a tilting street.
The stuff is liquid, it would flow downhill
so very quickly if the hill were steep.

How perilously do these fountains leap

Whose reckless voyager am I!
In mothering darkness, Lord, I pray Thee keep
these springs a single touch of sun could dry. (9)

In the above lines, Williams depicts the night’s searching for love as a sensational

experience, a thrilling yet dangerous undertaking clearly suggesting that homosexual

activity is not welcomed in the society of his time and manifestation of one’s own

homosexuality might meet with harsh repercussions. He describes the true nature of

homosexual cruising demonstrating how furtive and anonymous the gay men’s

rendezvouses are. They must occur in “mothering darkness” of the night lest “a single

touch of sun” should “dry their passion”—the narrator suggests that once devoid of the

cloak of the night the desire loses its magic. Cruising is furtive and secretive not just

due to the social prejudice but because that assures the atmosphere of anonymity and

lightheartedness for homosexual men.

In the next stanza, Williams carries forward his reflections and contemplates the

strength of homosexual desire:

It is an instant froth that globes the world

an image gushing in a crimson stream
But let the crystal break and there would be
the timeless quality but not the dream. (9)

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He suggests that sexual craving appears as something sudden, spontaneous and

extremely alluring. The night’s random sexual encounters do not carry the ‘quality’ with

them, they do not offer lasting happiness but are elusive like “the dream.” Nevertheless

they allow the thrill and indefinable beauty that are worthwhile. This frank expression

of homosexual desire demonstrates the author’s delight in homosexuality and his

appreciation of sensual, purely physical aspects of it.

In the next stanza, the author discloses his sexual cravings further on—the

lyrical I unveils the experience of homoerotic cruising in an almost phantasmagoric

fashion:

Sometimes I feel the island of my

self
A silver mercury that slips and
runs,
Revolving frantic mirrors in itself
Beneath the pressure of a million
thumbs.

Then I must that night go in search of one

unknown before but recognized on sight
whose touch, expedient or miracle,
stays panic in me and arrests my flight

Before day breaks I follow the street,

companioned to a rocking space above
Now do my veins in crimson cabins keep
the wild and witless passengers of love. (10)

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Williams once again uses the image of an island to represent his own sexuality. He

characterizes it as something unbridled and uncontrollable which “slips and runs” and

revolves “frantic mirrors in itself.” He reveals the peculiar character of gay cruising;

mentions the codes that are used by homosexuals to distinguish themselves in the

crowd. In the quoted fragment, he notices that a code may be an “expedient or miracle”

touch, which signifies an invitation to spend a night together and that informs him that

he did not misdirect his courtship. The night spent with another man restores the

balance of emotions and self-command of the lyrical I since the “wild and witless

passengers of love” are now satiated.

In the face of the common criticism of Tennessee Williams as a closeted and

self-loathing gay writer, “The Siege” could give a lie to such accusations. The poem

demonstrates that Williams does not hesitate to praise the pleasures of homosexual

cruising. Notwithstanding that it is an act that in its nature is a purely carnal and

instinctive behavior, and suggests promiscuity, Williams extols the charms of it.

Consequently, it should be observed that in his poetic heritage, the author manages to

capture and contemplate both profane and ethereal aspects of gay romance. His honest

and comprehensive reflection on homoerotic love may be considered a worthy

homosexual poetry.

The candid tone of Williams’s poetry leads us to see all different dimensions of

homosexual life. As a poet, he presents us with his adoration of gay sexuality, his

sympathetic and tender reflections on gay promiscuity. However, he also voices his

perplexity and consternation over the strength of these carnal drives, and hence a

considerable proportion of his lyric verse concerns the dilemma raised by the opposition

of carnality and spirituality in love life. Another aspect of Williams’s poetry that shall

be presented in this study concerns a social response to homosexuality. In many of his

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lyrics, Williams stresses the burden of gay people which stems from the society’s

rejection of and prejudice against them. A representative of such an attitude could be the

lyric titled [“I Think the Strange, the Crazed, the Queer”]. Here, one may observe the

author’s sympathy for the unaccepted, “damned” and “misfit” but one may also sense

the bitter foreshadowing of their extinction:

I think the strange the crazed the queer

will have their holiday this year,
I think for just a little while
there will be pity for the wild.

I think in places known as gay,

in secret clubs and private bars,
the damned will serenade the damned
with frantic drums and wild guitars.

I think for some uncertain reason,

mercy will be shown this season
to the lovely and misfit,
to the brilliant and deformed—

I think they will be housed and warmed

And fed and comforted awhile
before, with such a tender smile,
the earth destroys her crooked child. (150)

The significant feature of this poem is the choice of epithets for describing gay people.

They are “the strange, the crazed, the queer.” This manner of illustrating homosexuals is

particularly characteristic of Williams’s poetic expression. The author describes them—

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as the society would—as wild, deformed, misfit and damned. They are the earth’s

crooked children, however, he says, they are also lovely and brilliant. As Patricia

Grierson phrases it, the characters in Williams’s poetry “are strange creatures molded

into an almost schizophrenic beauty by their oddness” (A Guide to Research, 235). The

playwright presents them as disfigured and ugly, yet points to their unique beauty and

laments the treatment they receive from their contemporaries. In this poem, Williams

draws a surrealistic picture of the future. He observes that there will be yet “for just a

little while/...pity for the wild” and that “in places known as gay,/ in secret clubs and

private bars,” for yet another moment gays will be able to enjoy and express their

love—“before, with such a tender smile,/ the earth destroys her crooked child.”

Williams suggests here that there is no future in society for homosexuals. As the author

lived and created in the 1950’s, when the prejudice of McCarthy’s era was immensely

harmful and destructive for gay people, he voiced his concerns and grieves. He realized

that the society’s rejection and repression affected homosexuals to the point that it

destroyed their personal and family lives and sometimes led to suicides. In the above

poem, Williams touches on his deepest doubts implying that perhaps it is not possible to

resist this omnipresent enmity and that homosexuality could in fact be only a freak of

nature that has no chance of surviving.

Also in the poem titled “Lament for the Moths,” one may observe that the author

laments the unfavorable fate of homosexuals. In the lyric they are embodied in the

moths—the delicate and vulnerable creatures who die of poison spread in the air. The

lyrical I announces their forthcoming end:

A plague has stricken the moths, the moths are dying,

Their bodies are flakes of bronze on the carpets lying.
Enemies of the delicate everywhere

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 Have breathed the pestilent mist into the air. (17)

Williams draws a picture of a spreading plague which symbolizes an escalating

animosity against gay people, the public atmosphere of disapproval and aversion. The

author again despairs of homosexuals ever being able to lead normal open lives, since

being a witness to McCarthy’s oppressive politics he could see “the delicate,” falling

into self-loathing and depression by breathing in “the pestilent mist.” Further on,

Williams voices his sorrow over the unfair and senseless death of the admirable, gentle

and graceful “moths”:

Lament for the velvety moths, for the moths were lovely.
Often their tender thoughts, for they thought of me,
eased the neurotic ills that haunt the day.
Now an invisible evil takes them away.

I move through the shadowy rooms, I cannot be still,

I must find where the treacherous killer is concealed.
Feverishly I search and still they fall
as fragile as ashes broken against the wall.

Now that the plague has taken the moths away,

who will be cooler than curtains against the day,
who will come early and softly to ease my lot
as I move through the shadowy rooms with a troubled heart. (17)

One may notice that the author demonstrates a tremendous tenderness towards “the

moths.” He reminisces that they would “ease the neurotic ills that haunt the day,” that

they were his comfort and joy, and now when they are dying he feels helpless and

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anguished. It should be emphasized that his compassion towards gay people is here

more evident than anywhere else in his work. It marks the discrepancy between the

degree of openness in his previous writings and his poetry. Whereas in many of his

plays and short stories Williams presented the troubled, closeted, often self-loathing and

self-destructive gay individuals, he could never comment on their lives in as candid way

as he does it in his poetry. In the above lyric he clearly suggests that he identifies with

“the delicate” ones, as well as shows his anti-homophobic attitude, grieving their ill-

treatment and subjugation. In the last stanza of the poem, Williams the poet calls for the

strength of the oppressed; he notices that although unaccepted, they are desired in this

world:

Give them, O mother of moths and mother of men,

strength to enter the heavy world again,
for delicate were the moths and badly wanted
here in a world by mammoth figures haunted! (17)

The poems “Lament for the Moths” and [“I Think the Strange, the Crazed, the

Queer”] prove Williams’s concern for gay people being disregarded and discriminated

against. In these poems one may find the most forward and bold homosexual writing of

Williams. He identifies himself with the victimized people, expresses his sympathy for

them and his protest against their maltreatment. These poems add to his frank lyrics

about gay love to give a genuine picture of homosexual life. The author, himself being a

homosexual who felt the need to stay in a closet for a long time, could relate to his own

experience. As was discussed in the previous chapters, throughout his entire writing

career he numerously pointed to the problem of homophobia. More often indirectly than

not, he suggested the lack of social understanding as well as the common failure to

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accept one’s own sexuality on the part of gay people. Nevertheless, the impartiality

towards these phenomena present in his plays and short stories incited many critics to

underestimate the author’s contribution to gay literature. His poetry, though much more

candid, straightforward and devoted to homosexuality, being less noted and acclaimed

than his drama and short fiction, never really managed to overcome this judgment.

The third chapter of this study was designed to demonstrate the candidness of

Williams’s poetry as opposed to his plays and short stories. It reveals that poetic

expression, being a less popular literary form, less exposed to public opinion, facilitates

a frank examination of matters that in the author’s time were still considerably delicate

and fairly suspicious. Using lyrical verse, Williams could finally express his genuine

feelings about homoeroticism and comment on the predicaments of life of homosexual

people without restraint. The poems discussed in this chapter prove to be deeply

concerned with homosexual sensibility—they touch on the eroticism and emotionality

of gay relationships as well as problems of their social acceptance. They comprise

acutely personal confessions and reminiscences of the playwright’s own love

experiences and sexual adventures which he chose to share with his readers. The

extreme openness of his poems regarding both profoundly emotional love quandaries as

well as cruising for carnal pleasures, and not excluding the social problem concerning

homosexuality, renders Williams’s lyrical verse an entirely rightful and valuable gay

literature.

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 CONCLUSION

The literary work of Tennessee Williams has been appreciated and broadly

discussed among scholars and critics around the world ever since he appeared on

Broadway with his successful and memorable plays: Glass Menagerie (1945) and

Streetcar Named Desire (1947). For a long time, however, the fact that the author was

gay and that he endowed many of his famous pieces with meaningful homosexual

content was dismissed. This study demonstrates how significant, in fact, his

contribution to the gay literary heritage was.

Williams lived and created his greatest works in the times when homosexuality

was considered a disorder that one ought to have treated, when gay people along with

communists were regarded national traitors, and when disclosing oneself as a

homosexual could ruin one’s professional and personal life. In those times, it was

exceptionally difficult for public figures to express any sympathetic or favourable views

on gay issues. Nevertheless, Tennessee Williams managed to do that, though in an

indirect and camouflaged manner. Taking heed of the different modes of literary

expression that the author practiced, it is noted that for each of them Williams employed

versatile rhetorical techniques and above all various measures of outspokenness.

Consequently, as he was renowned mostly for his plays and these were exposed to the

public attention the most, the homosexual discourse in them may be found sedulously

concealed among symbols and codes of gay culture. The author’s short stories, on the

other hand, are a lot more daring in comparison to his plays. It seems that via his short

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fiction Williams appealed specifically to his gay readers yet communicating mainly

through evasiveness and insinuations. Only his poetry appears to be utterly unrestrained

by the taboo of the epoch. This is where the playwright allocated his true feelings,

thoughts and comments about homosexuality.

It must be emphasized as well, that not only the means of literary expression

framed the degree of Williams’s openness about the issues of homoeroticism.

Throughout the oppressive 1950’s, the subculture of homosexuals, united over their

common experience of injustice and rejection, was on its way to liberate itself. The

mood of the gay public was becoming increasingly rebellious against McCarthy’s

manipulative and frightful policy and finally in 1969, with the Stonewall riot,

homosexuals managed to lay the foundations for the gay liberation movement and

started fighting for their rights. During this time, also in the work of Tennessee

Williams, one may observe the unusual frankness and a growing rebellious spirit.

Beginning with Tennessee Williams’s early dramas, the above study traces the

characters and literary devices that the author utilized to convey allusions about the

problems that gay people struggled with during the Cold War era. In his early plays, the

playwright found symbolic language and equivocality as perfect instruments to share his

grieves and sorrows with his more attentive audiences. In the first instance, Chapter I

examines the characters who embody homosexual features. The objective is to

demonstrate that the bodily and behavioral features link Williams’s closeted gay

characters and argue that the characteristics were purposefully highlighted by the

playwright to comprise a distinct code of latent homosexuality. The gay subtext that is

carefully directed by Tennessee Williams in his early plays does not limit itself to the

characters’ features though. In order to touch on as controversial topic as homosexuality

was in 1950s, the playwright took advantage of numerous symbols of homosexuality,

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linguistic features, motifs and employed narrative techniques which center the readers’

attention on male characters and on their magnetic virility.

Chapter II proceeds to analyze Williams’s treatment of the theme of

homoeroticism in later plays and short fiction as opposed to the previously discussed

early dramas demonstrating their divergence in terms of straightforwardness. It is noted

that in Williams’s short stories and later dramas, although the rhetorical figures and

codes of homosexuality reoccur, there appear explicitly gay characters, whereas in the

earlier plays the reader would have to read between the lines in order to see that the

personae might be homosexual. Here, the playwright finally reveals gay people’s lives,

their emotional and sexual needs and although he unravels fairly mysterious and

confounding tales before us, the initiated readers are able to recognize the author’s

economical narrative style as a commentary on the atmosphere of secrecy that prevailed

the times of the Cold War era. Furthermore, the chapter points to the fact that due to

noticeably controversial and morbid renderings of homoerotic desire, the discussed

writing of Williams stigmatizes the author as being evasive and homophobic.

Nevertheless, it is noted that a discerning critic realizes the writer’s subversive writing

style since the playwright as a narrator becomes notoriously cynical, playing with the

perspective and reactions of his readers to bring about reflections and never state his

own opinions.

Chapter III approaches Williams’s least known and appreciated form of

expression—his poetry. It is argued that in his poems the playwright expresses his

thoughts and feelings concerning homosexuality in the broadest scope and in the most

candid manner. In the author’s lyrics, one may find a record of his own intimate

romantic memories, doubts and disappointments. Homoerotic love is unquestionably a

predominating topic of his lyric verse where he ponders on its spiritual and carnal

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aspects. Still, Williams—the poet does not abandon the social spirit of his previous

works. Here, the reader again finds the author pointing to the social rejection of gay

people and grieving their doomed fate.

Consequently, the study endeavours to document that consistently, with

diversified techniques, increasing candidness and poignant lyricism Tennessee Williams

managed to discuss the prohibited subject matter in the times when not many public

figures would venture to do alike. He proved to be a trailblazer for those playwrights

who dared to touch on the issues of homosexuality only in their less public writings. As

James Fisher asserts: “The fruit of his labor is particularly evident in subsequent

generations of playwrights who present gay characters and situations similar (and with

increasing) frankness, depth and lyricism” (Fisher, 5).

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