Liz, Augustin, & Tennessee Talk About Boys

Augustin: The year is 1947. The world was not ready. 

“Catch”, he brayed, and she called back, “What?”

And then we all got a load of Stanley’s meat.

It’s in the first few moments of A Streetcar Named Desire that we’re introduced to the swagger and eye candy of Stanley Kowalski. He disappears from the stage as quickly as he arrived, giving us a tease of the danger and the desire that surrounds him.

The world wasn’t ready. Until this moment, no man in western literature since the Greek and Roman heroes had been so lionized—not as just a warrior or a winner, but as a steaming heap of sexy. He was more than a one-syllable “man”…he was a three-syllable “may-uh-nuh”. Discussing a play like Streetcar, it can seem at first reductive to discuss the beefcake when such rich characters as Blanche, Stella, and the arguably more vulnerable Mitch are waiting in the wings for their next entrance. But there’s something unique about the smoldering Stanley that goes unnoticed in our modern age.

Tennessee Williams eroticized men in a way no other American playwright had before. He set them in front of the lens of complex women characters often torn between longing and danger—the two ends of desire. This wasn’t just unique of Williams as a playwright. It set him apart as a trailblazer for queer drama.

Oh, hey, Stanley.

Liz: As Tennessee Williams saw it, homosexuality was his “selected” way of life. His queer perspective shapes his written work, something that academics and artists love to excavate for their deeper meanings. What is wonderful about Williams’ treatment of homosexual desire is his frankness. At a time when such things were not meant for polite society, Williams’ writing blatantly explored his (sometimes dark) desire for male bodies. In a 1975 interview about his published memoirs, Williams said, “Sexuality is a basic part of my nature. I never considered my homosexuality as anything to be disguised. Neither did I consider it a matter to be over-emphasized. I consider it an accident of nature.”

In the same 1975 interview, Williams commented that his voice can often be found in his female characters. So like you said, A Streetcar Named Desire’s Stella and Blanche have the visceral experience of Stanley as a figure to be feared, ridiculed, and yet, lusted after.

A: So in a way, using women as the protagonists and the lens through which we understood the men onstage, he was exploring desire for men from a safer space, and that one degree of separation was enough for “polite society” as you termed it, to accept his brand of desire.

L: Speaking of undisguised but un-over-emphasized desire, Suddenly Last Summer introduces us to the poet Sebastian, whose desires and desirability take on a dark hue in the light of his sexually exploitative practices with young men in North Africa, and his tragic end being literally devoured by dark-skinned street children--gobbled up by the darker side of his longing.. Sebastian was certainly a predator feeding sexually off men, and yet, not an entirely undesirable one. The horror Mrs. Venable displays at her son also invites the audience’s empathy. Just as we see in Streetcar, it seems that desire and danger were, for Williams, entertwined. The character of Catharine, Sebastian’s cousin states, “we all use each other and that's what we think of as love.” Consuming flesh is, in turns, appealing and appalling; we find such appetites lurking in our most intimate relationships.

Elizabeth Taylor's Catharine sees more of
Sebastian in the film than we do onstage.

The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian by illustrates
 the painful juxtaposition between voluptuous
ecstasy and pain.

A: What’s so striking about Sebastian is that we never see him onstage, and yet—like the children that eat his flesh—we’re ravenous for him. Catharine and Violet both paint such a vivid picture of him that even in his absence, he’s erotic.

L: Like Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 

A: Right; both Skipper and Sebastian are dead at the outset of the play and yet they’re also the impetus for all of the action. In Sebastian’s case, it was his inability to negotiate sex with men that killed him. In the case of Skipper, it’s Brick’s inability to reciprocate the kind of love that Skipper was afflicted by that ultimately starved and killed Skipper.  In both instances, shame surrounding sexuality and men was what ended their lives.

Anika Noni Rose as Maggie pleads Terrence Howard's Brick

L: Meanwhile, Brick is a fading beauty, an aging football star—check two boxes of desirability for the people around him—whose emotional repression, gay or not, has resulted in an unhappy and sexually unfulfilling marriage. Skipper looms over him as a spectre. Brick’s bitterness and alcoholism is escalated by his rejection of Skipper’s declaration of desire, and Skipper’s subsequent suicide. Brick is destroyed by his self-denial and repression; he is doomed to a life of mendacity.

A: Unless he can, to borrow a Shanley quote by another queer icon, “Snap out of it!”…which is what his father, Big Daddy begs him to do. Just like Brick is being slowly disintegrated by his notions of male affection being dirty, Big Daddy knows that his entire fortune is built on the backs of two men in a reciprocal, healthy gay relationship—Jack Straw and Peter Ochello are two more dead gay men who add to the situation of the play, but they’re an illustration of what benefits pure love can generate.

 

L: …And can we just talk for a minute about Ollie Olsen in One Arm? Ollie is a former sailor and boxer, a hustler, and a powerful figure. Ollie is objectified blatantly in One Arm, as the seedy underbelly of desire both devours and sustains him.

A: More overtly than in other cases, his sexuality is his currency, and he thinks he’s always got good credit because he’s totally unaware of the emotional withdrawals he’s engaging in.

L: He also shapes those around him, his physical beauty, anger, and vulnerability leaving an impact on his patrons long after he is no longer available for their physical pleasure.

A: And before you know it, he’s way in debt (emotionally), and it’s too late for him to turn his life around. Between the real, deep tragedy and the fact that the screenplay was sooooooo gay for its time, it’s not surprising it took Moisés Kaufman adapting the play version for audiences to get a really good look at this character.

Adler Hyatt's Ollie in TWTC's recent One Arm is reached for by anyone in his sphere, but he is unable to reach back.

L: Desire is not simple in Williams’ work; it spells disaster when denied, yet it may devour us when indulged. Williams’ male objects of desire frighten and intoxicate, and Williams’ work plunges us into the churning consequence of our basest -- most beautiful -- nature.

A: I feel like there’s still so much more to discuss…We’ll be back next time to discuss Chance Wayne from Sweet Bird of Youth, Alvaro Mangiacavallo from The Rose Tattoo, and the semi-nefarious Chicken from Kingdom of Earth!