How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [67]
Inge had four huge hits on Broadway: Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). All were rather agonizing melodramas that got turned into popular Hollywood films. Another original screenplay of his, for Splendor in the Grass (1961), starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, is, along with Rebel Without a Cause, a classic of the prototype teen flick. Natalie Wood is a girl who isn’t good enough for her boyfriend, and so her shallow boyfriend betrays her with another girl. I remember seeing it on television and identifying with the acute sense of alienation of Natalie’s character. Perhaps, because of the essential level of alienation being closeted entails, Inge was able to infuse a female character with a gay, sensitive level of articulation. Although he never came out officially, much later in life he wrote several unproduced plays with homosexual characters and themes. Yet Nebraska Wesleyan theater scholar Jay Scott Chipman believes that even Inge’s closeted plays “could benefit from careful gay analysis.” He cites the playwright’s constant emphasis on sexuality, athleticism and muscle culture, and his constant, “incisive critique of heterosexual domesticity and desire. . . .”
When it comes down to it, the genre of the post-World War II Broadway melodrama was practically all gay-driven. As John M. Clum notes in his book Still Acting Gay:
Three of the four most critically acclaimed and commercially successful playwrights of the postwar period were closeted homosexuals whose plays were supported by the critical establishment so long as they maintained the conventions of closet drama. Of the pantheon of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Edward Albee, and Arthur Miller, only Miller was heterosexual. . . . In the 1950s, Broadway was still the venue for serious drama. . . . Williams, Albee, and Inge had to negotiate between their experience as homosexual men and the conventions of popular drama.
This blows my mind—that straight America was watching plays and movies created about their culture by gay men who could not even admit to being a part of their own uniquely creative and sexually exciting outsider culture. When I read Tennessee Williams’s first play, The Glass Menagerie, I saw it as a drama about family dynamics and failed heterosexual love. And that is what, as a part of a mass, straight audience, I was supposed to see. But some of my gay friends who read it in their teens saw Tom, the overly sensitive brother, as a homosexual with romantic yearnings for the gentleman caller he’s brought to meet his sister, Laura.
The attributes that the fifties female wanted in a man—that he be a man’s man, someone who was a bit rough around the edges and could sweep her off her feet—were created by homosexual writers who wanted the same thing. “Tennessee Williams invented the homosexual,” said one wag at a conference I attended. The hot look of Marlon Brando dressed in a white “wife beater” T-shirt (as he was in Streetcar Named Desire ) or in a leather motorcycle jacket, was a very fifties homosexual look that had started crossing over to the straight population. In an interview, gay drama professor Bud Coleman from the University of Colorado told me of his theory that it was Tennessee Williams who made it safe for America to eroti cize the male body. In his plays, it was often the men who were the sex objects, such as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, or Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And it was in Williams’s plays that men strutted center-stage in skimpy pajamas or with bare chests.
Of the three gay major playwrights I’ve mentioned, it was Williams who ultimately felt the most comfortable with, and was the earliest to begin discussing, his homosexuality. (Although he once declared to a newspaper reporter, “Brick Pollitt [of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof