Fertility of the land and the womb is crucial to the future of the Pollitt plantation, but that plantation was the offspring of a gay couple and will go to Brick and his determined wife, Maggie. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof comes as close to valorizing homosexuality as Williams got in his plays.

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Suddenly Last Summer

Suddenly Last Summer is one of Williams's more poetic dramas, a meditation on desire and cannibalism, which combines many of Williams's more common themes and images. A young woman, Catherine, has been institutionalized and threatened with the possibility of lobotomy for telling the truth about the death of her cousin, Sebastian Venable.

Catherine is one of the many women in Williams's work (one thinks particularly of Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Blanche Dubois) whose fate (institutionalization and the threat of lobotomy) is that of his sister, Rose.

Catherine has been brought to the conservatory of the splendid New Orleans home of Sebastian's powerful mother to face her family and a psychiatrist. The conservatory is filled with carnivorous plants and filled with the sounds of the jungle. It is Sebastian's garden, representing his vision of nature, that he tried to capture in his poetry, but was most vividly depicted in his death as he was torn apart and eaten by the poor Mexican boys whose sexual favors he sought.

Sebastian saw the world as variations on cannibalism, but the ultimate violence is threatened by his mother: "Cut this hideous story out of her brain." Mrs. Venable, intent on protecting her son's image as an asexual visionary primarily devoted to his poetry and to her as his muse, will mutilate Catherine's mind rather than have the truth known about her son's homosexual activity.

However, the psychiatrist will not order the lobotomy and Catherine's narrative, the truth about Sebastian, will take precedence over his privately published poetry.

On one level, Suddenly Last Summer can be seen and read as Williams's depiction of the relationship between homosexual life and art, about the price paid for revealing the policed secret of homosexuality. Yet once again, the homosexual is dead, never seen but only discussed, like Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Blanche's first husband, who shot himself when Blanche publicly confronted him with his homosexuality.

Only Baron de Charlus in the more fantastic Camino Real (1953) appears on stage. When in the 1970s Williams could actually depict homosexuality more candidly, he created, in Small Craft Warnings (1970), a self-hating homosexual artist who laments the "deadening coarseness" in the lives of most homosexuals.

Conclusion

However, this literal reading of Williams's plays neglects the ways he brilliantly codes his plays so that gay readings are possible. A Streetcar Named Desire, in particular, can be seen and read as a gay play. Its theatrical transformations, camp, and careful use of gay slang (less known by a general audience in 1947) allow gay audiences to read their own transgressive text.

This is not to say that Blanche is literally a gay man in drag but can be read as male and/or female, gay and/or straight. Certainly the focus on the animal magnetism of the macho Stanley Kowalski, treating him as object of characters' and audience's gaze and desire and--in his silly, sometime brutal masculine posturing--also of their ridicule, can be given a gay reading.

Belle Reprieve, the 1991 gender-inverted deconstruction of Streetcar performed by the gay troupe Bloolips and the lesbian troupe Split Britches, offered a hilarious but cogent gay interpretation of Williams's classic.

[Information about "Tennessee Williams's Late Plays" may be found here.]

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

Before Stonewall, censorship of the theater caused authors to encode homosexual content in publicly-presented plays.

Although film may be a director's rather than a writer's medium, gay and lesbian screenwriters have made significant contributions to both mainstream and independent film.

French semiotician Roland Barthes argued that the reintroduction of the sentimentality of love into sexuality would be the ultimate transgression.

An eminent professor and translator as well as a drama critic and playwright, Eric Bentley--whether writing from inside or outside the closet--has consistently supported the representation of same-sex desire in the theater.

Actor-director Robert Drivas brought a provocative sexuality and an emotional intensity to his stage and screen performances at a time when the male body was being liberated as the object of the audience's gaze.

A fiercely comic playwright, as well as actor and screenwriter, Christopher Durang often incorporates gay themes and characters in his plays.

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

Although playwright, screenwriter, and director Moss Hart achieved great commercial success and popular acclaim, he suffered from severe depression and other emotional problems that were intensified, and possibly caused, by intense anxiety concerning his sexual orientation.

Award-winning writer and director Moisés Kaufman specializes in theatrical works that explore watershed moments in glbtq history, such as the Wilde scandal, the murder of Matthew Shepard, and the experience of East Berlin transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.

Best known as a screenwriter, Gavin Lambert was also a novelist and biographer who captured the essence of life in the film community in a perceptive and witty fashion.

One of the most distinguished and discerning British men of letters of the mid-twentieth century, John Lehmann is best known as an editor and publisher.

The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.

Publishers Stathis Orphanos and Ralph Sylvester, partners in life as well as business, are best known for their beautifully produced limited edition books; in addition, Orphanos is acclaimed for his photographs of celebrities and male nudes.

The frequently outrageous cultural commentary and caustic criticism of Camille Paglia have made her both famous and controversial.

Best known for his groundbreaking play Bent, iconoclastic playwright and screenwriter Martin Sherman has created an impressive body of work.

Having created a unique style, the Split Britches theater company has led the way in innovative lesbian performance.

In addition to writing fiction with gay and bisexual characters and situations, Donald Windham has made a significant contribution to gay studies as a memoirist and editor.