“a
caTaloG of unattractive as-
pects of his personality would be
fairly extensive,” Tennessee
Williams wrote of his father
some eighteen years after the lat-
ter’s death, “but towering above
them were, i think, two great virtues ... total honesty and total
truth, as he saw it in his dealings with others.” Despite the abu-
sive remarks that cornelius coffin Williams made during
Williams’ boyhood about his son’s effeminacy, laziness, and
exasperating impracticality—and despite cornelius’ drunken
tyranny over, and eventual abandonment of, his family—Ten-
nessee Williams’ father apparently planted in his son an ad-
mirable repugnance for people who cheat or take unfair
advantage of others, or who carry about them what Big Daddy
calls, in the film version of
Cat on a Hot Tin roof
(1958), an
“odor of mendacity.”
Williams extended to sexual behavior his own disgust with
dishonesty, insisting that people have the courage to acknowl-
ESSAY
Tennessee and sexual exploitation
r
aYMonD
-J
ean
F
ronTain
raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of english at the University of
Central Arkansas and editor of the academic quarterly
anQ
.
edge the nature of their desires. For Williams, sexual appetite is
the most natural thing in the world, yet the majority of people
are so ashamed of the basic realities of human nature that they
drape themselves in a cloak of gentility, feigning a disinterest in,
or outrage over, sexual matters. in the process, they render
themselves hypocritical and grotesquely unnatural. artists and
other independent spirits who have been marginalized because
of their supposedly anti-social sexual behaviors are tacitly ap-
plauded in Williams’ plays for their willingness to admit the
truth of their desires and to actively pursue what Williams terms
“the lyric quarry.” They prove heroic in their sexual honesty.
such naturalness is not without its own problems, needless
to say. Williams also admired his father’s repugnance for peo-
ple who exploit others. Throughout his life and career Williams
brooded over the question of how an individual can exercise the
courage to satisfy his or her appetite without physically brutal-
izing or being unkind to others. at what point, Williams re-
peatedly asked, does defiance of social convention risk
becoming insensitivity to the needs of one’s partner, if not the
outright exploitation of another person?
only in
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
(1981)—his
last play to be produced in new York city in his lifetime—did
Williams hit upon a metaphor to represent his life as a sexually
active gay man. august is living in penury in a shack on the
beach in Provincetown—much as Williams himself did during
what he calls in his
Notebooks
“that brilliant little summer of
1940,” when at age 29 he finally overcame his puritanical up-
bringing and enjoyed his first fully sexual love affair with an-
other man. a cataract in one eye has caused that eye to cloud
over, while the other eye remains clear, suggesting the way in
which august needs to find a balance between sexual rapa-
ciousness and gentleness. Williams was persuaded that, just as
two eyes are needed to enjoy full vision, so one needs to be both
sexually selfish and emotionally compassionate if one is to find
sexual happiness without hurting other people.
a second metaphor is offered when august explains to
clare that all his life he has felt like a child “waiting for a cir-
cus parade to come by. i hear the calliope in the distance. it gets
louder slowly, that light, haunting music,” only to be drowned
out by “a sudden torrent of rain” that sends everyone else scur-
rying to take shelter while august continues to wait hopefully.
Finally a black-coated policeman tells him that the parade’s
been canceled. in the play, august is finally able to enjoy the
parade only after he pressures a reluctant kip into spending the
night with him—much as Williams, looking back upon that
pivotal summer of 1940, understood his sexual life to have
begun when he convinced the physically spectacular, and
largely heterosexual, kip kiernan to have sex with him re-
peatedly during a two-week affair. like august, Williams had
waited with growing anxiety to enjoy the sexual parade that so-
12
The Gay & lesbian review
/
worldwide
