Key West to New York (via Bangkok): In Search of Androgyny

Abstract

The 1970s found Williams awakening from his self-proclaimed ‘stoned age’ to the social angst of the Cold War and to his personal struggle to conclude his life’s work, and reconfirm his rightful place in America’s literary pantheon. Consequently, the repeated attacks against his work of the 1960s would not deter Williams from continuing to write stories and plays, many of which were growing more sexually and homosexually explicit in the nation’s libertine years of the early 1970s. He saw these plays as his ‘chamber’ pieces, those works on a scale much smaller than his opus plays of the 1940s and 1950s. It was also the decade that he wrote his pot-boiler Memoirs, a cause célèbre that seriously impeded any chance he had for a Broadway comeback. As was the case in the 1960s, Williams fought the critics, the producers, his agents, and his audiences in these early years of the 1970s over issues pertaining to his waning artistic abilities, but now that he was fully out of the closet, his sexuality became more important an issue to his audiences than his art, something Williams did not exactly try to counter.