Was tennessee williams gay

“The Ghost of a Man”: The Quest for Self-Acceptance in Early Williams

Dean Shackelford

Scholarship on the works of Tennessee Williams from a gay perspective is increasing every year, but thus far, there has been little attention to his one-act plays.¹ John Clum, author of Acting Gay, focuses primarily on A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Steaming Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer; his analyses, while provocative, fail to account for the complexity of Williams’s gay subjectivity even when he tempers his harsher commentary in Still Acting Gay, a revision of the earlier work. 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 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. An examination of three plays from the first published edition of 27 Wagons Occupied of Cotton and Other Short Plays provides a case in point.

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from The Gay & Woman loving woman Literary Heritage, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), which is the best references work on GLBT Literature. CAPITALIZED NAMES refer to related articles in the book.

Like many Nineteenth Century writers who were celebrities as well as artists, particularly writers whose operate is often autobiographical, Williams's life is almost as well known as his work. Born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911, his mother was a prim minister's daughter, his father a tough shoe salesman who called his son "Miss Nancy." In the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie (1945), Williams includes his father only as a smiling photograph on the wall, a case of artistic wishful thinking. Williams's deepest attachment was to his sister, Rose, institutionalized in the 1930s and lobotomized after accusing her father of sexual overuse. A published writer of fiction and poetry since he was a teenager, Williams studied writing at the University of Iowa and, after some initial failures, became the optimal known playwright of the 1940s and 1950s. The last twenty years of his life were spent trying to recapture the success of his initial plays, but substance exploitation and a los

In honor of National Womxn loving womxn, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride month, we are celebrating openly male lover playwright Tennessee Williams—as adequately as his excellently styled mustache! Today’s Facial Hair Friday comes from Jen Hivick, an archives technician at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, MO.

Tennessee Williams was a renowned playwright in 20th-century America. Perhaps leading known for his perform A Streetcar Named Desire, he also wrote a number of plays—such as Cat on a Sizzling Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie—that are, almost a century on, still considered a staple in theaters across the U.S.

Thomas Lanier Williams III, later known as Tennessee Williams, was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri, when he was eight, and there he began the career that eventually made him celebrated. In high school and college, he wrote concise stories for magazines such as Weird Tales and won numerous awards for his poetry; he also wrote plays that were put on by local playhouses.

Even as a college student, Williams was ardent about his writing to the point of conceit; when he was not awarded a poetry prize at Washington Unive

by William Stanley DeVito (’23)

Abstract

This dramaturgical study serves as a prerequisite to directing an autobiographical work of Tennessee Williams, The Pride, or Approaching the Finish of a Summer, regarding his unguarded sexuality by engaging in research that extended beyond the scope of traditional biographical criticism. As this play conveys a real heartbreak experienced by Williams in Provincetown in a fictional matter to serve as a therapeutic process for Williams, it was integral to examine how this compete was written and subsequently evolved. Through applying gender non-conforming theory, examining cultural and intellectual history, and by acquiring letters written by Williams during the real-world events and the writing of the play, it has been found that Williams’ original play depicting his summer of heartbreak devolved tremendously upon writing his full-length edition in order to shield his sexuality from audiences. This original draft serves as an antithesis to well-liked beliefs held by scholars about Williams’ supposed internalized homophobia and shame.

Key words: queer theory, Tennessee Williams, The Parade, queer theater, gay theater

Introduction

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