Qutn about Sudnly Last Summer: “Was Tennsee Wiliams gay?”
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WAS TENNSEE WILIAMS GAY?
What you may not know is that the playwright was homosexual durg a time Ameri’s history that was practilly crimal to be such.
It was durg the late 1930s when Williams me to terms wh his homosexualy. The Uned Stat was fairly nservative durg this time, and life was harsh for homosexuals. Many laws were passed outlawg gay relatnships.
Beg openly gay durg his lifetime was an timidatg proposn, but Williams ran hard and fast wh , experiencg public, temptuo relatnships that would have ma him verifiable Instagram fire if he'd jt stuck out for a few more s. In Williams’ life, tty remarks were tossed at him and thrown back to his iends Donald Wdham, Gore Vidal, and Tman Capote, that is to say, other gay wrers of his generatn whose cricism Williams endured, even as he tolerated their work as playwrights (yet somehow passg on to them that he knew himself to be the superr dramatist—and was).
TENNSEE WILLIAMS’ PATGS EXPLORED BEG GAY AMERI
By the time Streetr Named Dire h Broadway, Williams had moved on to who would be the love of his life, aspirg wrer Frank a gay man, the wrer had been mocked all his life, lled "sissy" by sneerg peers, and “Miss Nancy” by his dnken, abive father. Th, A Streetr Named Dire's movie adaptatn was forced to tone down some arser language, and cut some of s most sndalo elements, like Blanche's promiscuy and her late hband beg a closeted homosexual.
At The New York Tim, Michael Adno exam the patgs of Amerin playwright Tennsee Williams, who ed the visual medium to explore what meant to be gay Ameri durg the ’70s. The novelist Edmund Whe, whose name has bee synonymo wh gay lerature, believed that Williams’s plays “Cat on a Hot T Roof” and “A Streetr Named Dire” were — a veiled way — exprsns of gay sire.
Whe said a telephone terview, addg that this work ma gay life more visible to him — and to Ameri — when he was growg up the 1950s. “Certaly, as a young gay kid, I turned on to that work tremendoly. ”Beyond his plays, Williams’s patgs were a means to lve to subjects like what meant to be a gay man Ameri.