eighteen as one in four, usually by a family member.)
Stella tellingly declares, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley,” to which Eunice, a traditionalist friend, advises, “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on.”
Ironically, the sexual violence in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and its screen version was mitigated by the casting in both of the enormously attractive Marlon Brando, who was also too young for the role, which Williams had envisioned as closer in age to his father. Brando glamorized Kowalski (note the
k
sound, as in “Cornelius”), making him more commercially appealing. He inadvertently made the rape scene seem less an act of evil than a possibly secret fantasy—not so secret on the part of some heterosexual women and some gay men. Tennessee felt that Marlon’s youthful beauty “humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man.”
To his surprise, Marlon was identified with Stanley by Tennessee Williams:
“Tennessee has made a fixed association between me and Kowalski. I mean, we’re friends and he knows that as a person I am just the opposite of Kowalski, who was everything I’m against—totally insensitive, crude, cruel. But still, Tennessee’s image of me is confused with the fact that I played that part. So I don’t know if he could write for me in a different color range.”
If
Streetcar
does have a character based on Williams, it would be Blanche’s late homosexual husband, Allan (note the double
l’
s in both names), a sensitive soul and a poet. Tennessee Williams always considered himself a poet at heart and often aired his belief that like his role model, gay poet Hart Crane, he would die young. Deeply personal poems are embedded in various of Tennessee’s plays. But as with the murdered Sebastian Venable in
Suddenly, Last Summer
, the suicidal Allan doesn’t actually appear in Williams’s play. Gay characters in his early plays were typically spoken of, rather than fleshed out, and were, of course, stereotyped.
The playwright usually readily agreed to censorship of movies of his work and practiced self-censorship in his plays, reasoning that a watered-down message reaching a wide audience was better than an undiluted one reaching very few—“though generally I try to leave messages to Western Union, you know.”
The myth is that America’s first semi-openly gay playwright (eventually openly gay) was: (a) pro-gay and thus “biased” toward gay characters, (b) “obsessed” with injecting homosexuality into his plays, and (c) was far ahead of his time in so doing. Williams was prescient in delineating psychosexual—occasionally including homosexual—themes and motivations in his avant-garde plays. However, his treatment of non-heterosexual characters and themes was very much of its era; similarly in his less self-censored short stories. Tennessee’s gays are stereotypical, hated, and self-hating.
His Baron de Charlus in
Camino Real
(1953) contemplates a sexual interlude comprising “an iron bed with no mattress and a considerable length of stout knotted rope.” Too often, Tennessee’s homosexuals don’t enjoy sex, or they require it in S/M fashion. The Baron requires “Chains this evening, metal chains, I’ve been very bad, I have a lot to atone for.”
Death prematurely takes too many of Williams’s gay characters, who frequently instigate their own demises. Ergo, even while the playwright was “daring” in even broaching how the other tenth purportedly lives—and loves—or that it even existed, he habitually placated authorities, critics, and average theatergoers by depicting and terminating his gay characters in the traditionally approved way. Williams’s plays are
not
brimming with gays and lesbians. Time and again, a gay theatergoer’s reaction to encountering one of Tennessee’s gay characters—they almost never come in pairs—turns quickly
Stella tellingly declares, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley,” to which Eunice, a traditionalist friend, advises, “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on.”
Ironically, the sexual violence in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and its screen version was mitigated by the casting in both of the enormously attractive Marlon Brando, who was also too young for the role, which Williams had envisioned as closer in age to his father. Brando glamorized Kowalski (note the
k
sound, as in “Cornelius”), making him more commercially appealing. He inadvertently made the rape scene seem less an act of evil than a possibly secret fantasy—not so secret on the part of some heterosexual women and some gay men. Tennessee felt that Marlon’s youthful beauty “humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man.”
To his surprise, Marlon was identified with Stanley by Tennessee Williams:
“Tennessee has made a fixed association between me and Kowalski. I mean, we’re friends and he knows that as a person I am just the opposite of Kowalski, who was everything I’m against—totally insensitive, crude, cruel. But still, Tennessee’s image of me is confused with the fact that I played that part. So I don’t know if he could write for me in a different color range.”
If
Streetcar
does have a character based on Williams, it would be Blanche’s late homosexual husband, Allan (note the double
l’
s in both names), a sensitive soul and a poet. Tennessee Williams always considered himself a poet at heart and often aired his belief that like his role model, gay poet Hart Crane, he would die young. Deeply personal poems are embedded in various of Tennessee’s plays. But as with the murdered Sebastian Venable in
Suddenly, Last Summer
, the suicidal Allan doesn’t actually appear in Williams’s play. Gay characters in his early plays were typically spoken of, rather than fleshed out, and were, of course, stereotyped.
The playwright usually readily agreed to censorship of movies of his work and practiced self-censorship in his plays, reasoning that a watered-down message reaching a wide audience was better than an undiluted one reaching very few—“though generally I try to leave messages to Western Union, you know.”
The myth is that America’s first semi-openly gay playwright (eventually openly gay) was: (a) pro-gay and thus “biased” toward gay characters, (b) “obsessed” with injecting homosexuality into his plays, and (c) was far ahead of his time in so doing. Williams was prescient in delineating psychosexual—occasionally including homosexual—themes and motivations in his avant-garde plays. However, his treatment of non-heterosexual characters and themes was very much of its era; similarly in his less self-censored short stories. Tennessee’s gays are stereotypical, hated, and self-hating.
His Baron de Charlus in
Camino Real
(1953) contemplates a sexual interlude comprising “an iron bed with no mattress and a considerable length of stout knotted rope.” Too often, Tennessee’s homosexuals don’t enjoy sex, or they require it in S/M fashion. The Baron requires “Chains this evening, metal chains, I’ve been very bad, I have a lot to atone for.”
Death prematurely takes too many of Williams’s gay characters, who frequently instigate their own demises. Ergo, even while the playwright was “daring” in even broaching how the other tenth purportedly lives—and loves—or that it even existed, he habitually placated authorities, critics, and average theatergoers by depicting and terminating his gay characters in the traditionally approved way. Williams’s plays are
not
brimming with gays and lesbians. Time and again, a gay theatergoer’s reaction to encountering one of Tennessee’s gay characters—they almost never come in pairs—turns quickly
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