IN 1950, playwright André Gide wrote that “in the theater, homosexuality is always a false accusation, never a fact of life.” Vincente Minnelli’s film Tea and Sympathy, which opened on movie screens fifty years ago last fall, revolves around precisely such a false accusation. Rumor and innuendo destroy the reputation of a student at a boys’ boarding school; the boy’s road to redemption challenges postwar conformity, group masculinity, and smothering mothers—but never, of course, the closet. For that reason, gay critics have dismissed Tea and Sympathy in the decades since 1956. But a careful look at the circumstances of its creation and its wide-ranging cultural impact suggest that the film offered 1950’s America enough tea and sympathy to merit a reconsideration.
Based on a popular 1952 Broadway play by Robert Anderson, the film Tea and Sympathy follows Tom Lee (John Kerr), whose fellow students harass him as a “sister boy” because he prefers feminine undertakings such as sewing, drama, and—worst of all—folk music to horseplay and football. In the stage version, Tom’s crime is skinny-dipping with a teacher of doubtful masculinity; the film, more chastely, indicts him for joining a sewing circle of faculty wives. Under the spotlight, Tom is rejected by his classmates, his teachers, and even his own father, who forces him to quit his cross-dressing role in the school play and urges him to act like a “regular guy.” Tom finds his only friend in the housemaster’s wife Laura Reynolds (Deborah Kerr), who is gently warned by another woman to offer students nothing more than “tea and sympathy.” Yet the other characters’ rejections of Tom are more complicated than appear at first glance. In an era that took its Freud so seriously that newsstands stocked copies of a comic book called Psychoanalysis, the film’s characters are a congeries of repression: Tom’s initially sympathetic roommate and his tyrannically masculine housemaster are both coded as latent homosexuals; Tom’s father is hopelessly incapable of expressing emotion toward his son. Laura, trapped in a loveless marriage and emotionally over-involved in Tom’s case, finds herself unable to stick to tea and sympathy; at the story’s end, she makes a fateful decision to “save” young Tom’s sexuality by seducing him. Laura’s final, fateful line bespeaks a psyche as tortured as that of Blanche DuBois: “Years from now,” she whispered, “when you talk about this—and you will—be kind.” If Tea and Sympathy’s watered-down Freudianism was run of the mill, its depiction of homosexuality was hardly path-breaking either, even by the standards of the 1950’s. Truman Capote and James Baldwin offered the decade’s readers openly gay characters in their novels. Theatre was even more forthright, as Tennessee Williams showed in such masterpieces as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer. Still, the play was deemed too risqué for Boston or London, where it was banned. It faced no such And yet, it’s not entirely clear that Tea and Sympathy is about homosexuality at all. Certainly author Robert Anderson didn’t think so. He began work on the play during World War II in the Navy’s hothouse world of scrutinized masculinity, and later reflected that he had “always seen the play basically as a love story.” Deborah Kerr, who played the housemother’s role both on stage and screen, concurred. The play “is not about homosexuality at all—it’s about persecution of people whose ideas are different from yours.” In 1952, in the midst of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations, those different ideas were Communist ones. Critics widely regarded the stage version of Tea and Sympathy as an attack on the Cold War Red Scare, akin to the more frontal assaults posed by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Yet the anti-McCarthyist reading doesn’t square with the impulses of the play’s director, Elia Kazan, who began rehearsals just after returning from name-naming on the witness stand of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan, by contrast, found in the play’s indictment of conformity a powerful metaphor, not of McCarthyism, but of the totalitarian mind. The task of turning Tea and Sympathy from a play into a film landed with director Vincente Minnelli. Minnelli was an apt choice, not only because he was deeply closeted himself but also because, as the director of the Vincent Van Gogh biopic Lust for Life (1956), he found in Anderson’s play another opportunity to explore the high price paid in the 1950’s by anyone who dared to live off the straight and narrow path. However, fresh from such Technicolor extravaganzas as Brigadoon (1954) and Kismet (1955), Minnelli struggled to film such an intensely personal drama. The film version suffers from many of the flaws common to adaptations from the stage, particularly its extravagant costumes and its habit of moving the setting from one location to another for no apparent reason other than because it can, robbing the story of much of its intimacy. The real obstacle in the way of production, though, was not Technicolor but “The Code.” A set of self-imposed industry standards that had regulated sexual representations on screen since 1934, the Production or Hays Code prohibited even “the inference of sex perversions” such as homosexuality. Equally problematic in the censors’ minds was the film’s climactic scene of adulterous seduction. In such cases, warned the Code, “there must be some indication that the sin is punished suitably.” Getting the movie past the censors proved to be a dynamic dance between adultery and homosexuality. Minnelli punished Laura’s transgressions in a reluctantly added voice-over informing viewers she has ended up alone. The director also erased much of the play’s sexuality, with his leading lady’s assent. In early 1956, Deborah Kerr wrote Minnelli that Tea and Sympathy was fundamentally “about persecution of the individual, and … can stand alone I think—without the added problem of homosexuality.” Sewing replaced skinny-dipping, and along came “sister boy,” an appropriately vague but sufficiently precise epithet for the silver screen. (Even “sissy,” which appeared in script drafts, was considered too close to a naming of the unspeakable thing.) Accounts of the making of Tea and Sympathy have generally told this story as a tragic quid pro quo in which the film’s creators surrendered the theme of homosexuality to preserve a tale of adultery—precisely the thing that, in the story, had silenced Tom’s homosexuality in the first place. Some viewers were unsatisfied: one complained in a letter to The New York Times that Deborah Kerr’s character was “just plain lustful.” But most audiences, even if they were smaller than studio executives had hoped, were not fooled. Nor was Time magazine, which harrumphed against the Code’s assumption that “obviously the American public isn’t old enough to know that there is such a thing as homosexuality.” Anderson ultimately regretted the choices, saying later: “We kept fooling ourselves that we were preserving the integrity of the theme, but we lost some of it.” But Anderson is selling himself short. He and Minnelli were not defeated by the Code. In fact, exploiting the visibility and invisibility of the closet, they outwitted the Code, and ultimately helped to undo it. By the year’s end, industry standards had loosened, allowing depictions of adultery, abortion, and prostitution when done “in good taste”; a blanket ban on depictions of love that crossed the color line fell by the wayside too. By 1968, the whole business had been abandoned in favor of the current rating system. Viewed today, Tea and Sympathy remains as evocative as it is evasive. Particularly striking are its reflections on the politics of insinuation—a theme that must have resonated for Americans living in the witch-hunting, homo-hunting 1950’s. What better metaphor for communism than homosexuality, an idea that Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. exploited in his 1949 book The Vital Center, which fretted that communism “perverts politics into something secret, sweaty and furtive like nothing so much … as homosexuality in a boys’ school.” Indeed the 1952 revival of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1934), in which rumors of lesbianism destroy two teachers at a girls’ school, did the same work in the service of anti-anti-communism. Yet gay critics have been right to assault the use of homosexuality in 1950’s theatre as mere metaphor, suited only for making a point about something else. Tea and Sympathy’s call for toleration and its defense of the outsider obscured the specific experience of gay youth, to be sure, denying that, as Gide would put it, homosexuality could be a fact of life. In that sense Noël Coward understandably dismissed the film as “a mixture of naïveté and dishonesty … treated untruly and lasciviously.” And yet, Tea and Sympathy’s very evasiveness may have been what gave its gay viewers a shield of generality behind which they could come to their own conclusions. The film’s acts of denial made it possible to go see the movie without owning up to its obviously central theme—all the while knowing full well what it was about. That’s what the play offered the young actor Anthony Perkins, who took over John Kerr’s role on Broadway when Kerr left for filming in Hollywood. Perkins, who had been caught up in a gay scandal as a Rollins College freshman in 1950, brought more to the role than his viewers knew. The film also meant a lot to its viewers, who showered Deborah Kerr with letters “from young men who wrote that if only they had met someone as helpful and sensitive as Laura Reynolds when they were at school, their lives might have turned out more happily.” It would be too easy—snide almost—to dismiss these men as closet cases for writing love letters to an imaginary character. But fifty years later, it’s time for a little tea and sympathy. If nothing else, the film’s history testifies to the nimble imaginations of the men and women who found their way out of the 1950’s. Closets are dark places, but so are movie theaters, and from the darkest places have sometimes come our most vivid dreams. Christopher Capozzola teaches American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
problems in France, where a producer didn’t see the story’s point: “So the boy thinks he’s a homosexual, and the wife of the headmaster gives herself to him to prove that he’s not. But what is the problem?”
