Broadway Babylon by Boze Hadleigh Page A

from pleasure or validation to embarrassment or anger at the artist’s heavy-handed and disappointing methods.
    In any case, the myth that the playwright’s female characters were disguised men or based on himself doesn’t hold water. A great many were partly based on his mother or sister. His women, older or younger, often embody the iniquitous and cruel circumstances inflicted by men and by women who uphold patriarchy’s double standard. If Williams “pleads,” it’s less for his fellow gays than for the young and the old Roses—blossoms trapped and crushed by a society not of their own devising.
    It was this early feminism, as much as his incorporating even a whiff of lavender, that drew the establishment’s ire. Any man who underlined women’s problems would have been suspect, a “traitor” to male-heterosexual hegemony. As Tennessee’s sexual and affectional orientation became known, yet not openly written about, critical indignation grew. “Fetid swamp” was
Time
reviewer Louis Kronenberger’s phrase of preference for describing the playwright’s output and “obsessions.” Since Tennessee’s plays often dealt with neuroses, he was himself labeled neurotic by detractors neurotically obsessed with keeping homosexual men in their “place.”
    Under the aegis of far-right religious zealot Henry Luce,
Time
magazine for three decades spearheaded the anti–Tennessee Williams charge, invariablyassigning his plays negative reviews. In the early 1950s
Time
had gone so far as to label Williams a “pervert” in print. Shy, relatively new to the limelight, and vulnerable, he didn’t sue, and the media made him a habitual target.
Time
and other reactionary periodicals’ ongoing theme regarding Tennessee Williams’s plays was, “This is what our nation is coming to.” When the 1959 film of
Suddenly, Last Summer
, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Katharine Hepburn became a hit,
Time
critic Richard Schickel monopolistically bemoaned, “Why do we have to have all of this homosexuality in our movies?”
    The
New York Times
was anti-Tennessee too, and by the late ’60s when he was in steep commercial decline, it became universally “in” to bash him. Henry Luce’s
Life
magazine took out a full-page ad in the
Times
to sell issues by criticizing Williams.
    When Tennessee had included passing homosexuality in his early works, there had been nervous indignation, but his newer plays, with their undisguised and unmarried gay characters, elicited ever-greater media contempt and vituperation. Instead of allowing that the playwright was, like most mature artists, moving in new, less dollar-oriented directions toward a more specific, personal truth, critics dismissed his latest plays out of hand and declared that he was “past it” and his output no longer worthwhile.
    Several of his later, “smaller” plays have been posthumously acclaimed and withstood the test of time, but Williams, after people stopped flocking to his plays, was no longer in fashion. After he stopped writing for wider audiences and his runs grew shorter, vengeful detractors could and did make a difference. Word of mouth, from fewer mouths, counted for less than biased reviewers’ judgments, regardless of a given play’s merits. Then too, people were no longer so easily shocked—thanks to Tennessee, among others—and a “shocking” theme no longer automatically brought in the crowds.
    The mostly hostile critical reaction to Williams’s plays was ironic in that his treatment of gay characters didn’t evolve much. As late as the 1972
Small Craft Warnings
he had a character ruing the alleged fact that “There’s a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals”—never mind that homophobia is both coarse and deadening. Among the worst anti-gay influences working upon the impressionable playwright had been a homophobic psychiatrist to whom he’d trustingly, or masochistically, submitted his