Tennessee Williams

Abstract

What I offer in this essay is one reading of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire; how they can be seen as gay texts. Specifically, gay readers see the various meanings of these plays in a way unperceived by heterosexuals who have not experienced the same group victimisation, social rejection and legal oppression, with, frequently, a consequent devaluing of themselves, leading to guilt. Nor will straight readers necessarily recognise the often oblique strategies by which gay writers — unable through external censorship or, at least as often, self-censorship, to articulate their aspirations and desires openly — attempt the subverting of heterosexist culture.