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By Root 510 0

thing, the plays that stick around on Broadway eventually make their way to far-flung cities via road troupes. Then, later, those same plays are made into movies or television events. Both The Producers and Hairspray are to be made into films; ironically, each production started out as a film. So, even though only a tiny percent of Americans make it to the Great White Way, we are constantly being influenced by the legitimate theater’s offshoots. And then, of course, there are the classic American plays performed by high-school and community theater groups around the country. Many of these were written by gay men.

Surprises in the Backstage Closet

The one I couldn’t believe was Thornton Wilder. It was another Liberace moment for me—my literary gaydar had never gone off. I knew that Wilder had never married, but it never occurred to me that he was gay. How could the playwright who wrote the wholesome American classic Our Town be a closeted homosexual? Yet there he was on an Internet list of gay playwrights. Now, that listing doesn’t necessarily mean that he was gay. But biographers seem to conclude he was at least possibly a homosexual. He’s even claimed as queer by the “Gay Bears” of the UC Berkeley campus. (Wilder grew up in Berkeley. His mother was obsessed with culture; his father was often away at diplomatic posts in Asia.) Thornton Wilder seems to have had only one male lover in his life, and probably no one else, male or female. That’s sad. I wish he’d experienced more real-life passion.

I called a couple heterosexual friends with theater backgrounds who had never known, either. The man with whom Wilder might have had a brief affair (maybe as brief as one sexual encounter) was Samuel Steward, provocatively described on one gay site as “university professor, writer, tattoo artist, [and] pornographer.” Steward wrote erotic novels under the name Phil Andros and, along with Wilder, was friends with Gertrude Stein. One of Wilder’s biographers, Gilbert Harrison (The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder) wrote in 1983 that Steward described sex with Thornton Wilder as “so hurried and reticent, so barren of embrace, tenderness or passion that it might never have happened.” Harrison reports that according to Steward’s comments, Wilder found the act of man-on-man sex “unspeakable.”

In his book The United States, a paranoid Gore Vidal praises Thornton Wilder’s writing abilities, along with his ability to remain in the closet: “Fortunately for Wilder’s reputation, he was able to keep his private life relatively secret.”

Thinking about this hidden aspect of Thornton Wilder’s personality is like watching the movie Blue Velvet, in which Kyle MacLachlan finds a human ear in a perky, “normal” suburban field. Under the utter wholesomeness of Wilder’s hometown dramas lurks a dark, alienated side. There is always premature death and unfulfilled longing. His one-act, The Long Christmas Dinner, depicts several generations of one family going slowly and steadily through portals of life and into death. The breeders among the characters never fare well—the maiden aunts are always smarter than the married couples. And he does portray tortured, sexually ambivalent characters. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town (1938), Simon Stimson, the town drunk and organist for the Congregational Church in Grovers Corners, commits suicide. Some have said that he represents a closeted gay man destroyed by life in a small town.

Even if Thornton Wilder had never been outed, we would still have to count him as a pivotal figure in gay theater history. Adapting a German play into his popular stage hit The Matchmaker, he created the famous character of Dolly Levi, later to become a gay icon in the musical Hello, Dolly!, with music by the divinely gay Jerry Herman. That’s true homo-power.

Why were gay men so adept at exploring the American melodrama? William Inge is another gay playwright who remained closeted and yet produced several classics of heterosexual longing set in the small-town environment. I studied lots of his plays in high school, as many