What Does Any Of This Have To Do With Tennessee Williams?

In 2023 I was in the last semester of my MFA program, early in transition and rarely gendered correctly by the people around me. I had several instructors that informed me they were “bad with pronouns,” who also got mad when I told them to practice. My only refuge was the single private “all-gender” bathroom in the entire building, which was usually occupied by one of my classmates making a phone call or taking a horrifying shit.

I probably could have handled it with better humor if it was not for the growing tide of transphobia targeted at writers like myself. We were being banned from public stages and our books were being burned for the crime of having the details of our lives within them. It felt like I had spent my whole life finding myself as a writer, only to finally arrive at a time where I was more likely to summon a murderous mob than the audience I was seeking. 

(These things are still happening, but I’m used to them now. Which is its own tragedy, I suppose.)

It was in this fragile emotional state that I was assigned to analyze the text of A Streetcar Named Desire. Perhaps that is why I was stricken anew by the tragedy of Blanche DuBois’s marriage to Allan Grey, the doomed poet. Their relationship lasted until Blanche discovered him with another man in a hotel room, a moment that sparked the public confrontation over Allan's sexuality that ended with his suicide by revolver. In the uncensored text of the play, it is clear that Blanche’s grief and trauma from shaming Allan to suicide is the seed of the mental instability that Stanley Kowalski uses to break her for good.

It feels facile to say I feel a kinship with a writer like Tennessee Williams; it’s like a flashlight claiming the same common heritage as the moon. And yet, as I read the play through a queer lens for the first time, I felt I understood why a writer like Williams would create and kill a man like Allan Grey. It seems personal that Allan Grey was a queer poet, an identity that Williams treasured for himself alongside his recognition as a playwright. A Streetcar Named Desire even includes an epigram from Hart Crane, Willams’s own queer poetic hero who also died by suicide. 

It was like I could feel the strain of Williams pushing at every possible margin in order to claim a space to speak plainly about the cost of queerphobic shame, a cost that still reverberates for so many queer writers and artists in the present day. It felt brave, and correct.

Which is why I was maddened by the way that the cause of Allan’s death was excised from the shooting script for STREETCAR. I couldn't help but notice how anemic the Hollywood version felt in comparison. It stripped the story of needed pathos and destroyed something meaningful, just so straight moviegoers would not have to face discomfort by being exposed to an ugly truth.

I had a journal entry due, so I laid out my case for why censorship made the movie poorer than the play at every level. And I ended it on a personal note, reflective of the times I was writing in:

It may seem like I am overly worried about censorship of queer materials, but if I were invited to read this piece in the state that Tennessee Williams named himself after, I would have a choice to make. I could edit my own work, and take out the parts of my heart I included in the hopes that other queer people would find them resonant. I could cross my fingers that these changes would be enough to distract from my beard, while fully aware that anybody in the audience could still get me in trouble if they wanted to….Or maybe I wouldn’t be there at all if my story was harvested by cishet businessmen, the rough points filed off, the queer sex hidden in the margins where they think it belongs. I would be expected to be grateful for that opportunity, but the idea disgusts me. Nobody has a right to demand queer art stripped of its honesty just because they want to enjoy it without reflection or guilt.

This statement was returned to me with a single piece of critical feedback: 

What does any of this have to do with Tennessee Williams?

It is cliched to say that one has had a “Joker moment.” But that was the moment something broke within me. I had written several pages with heavy citations decrying the way a queer artist's work was mutilated for a straight audience's sensibilities, and even explained the impossible and frightening bind queer artists find themselves in presently. To write so plainly about the ways Williams's creative choices resonated through my own hopes and fears for my life as an artist, and to be met with bland, doe-eyed disingenuousness? Fuck that.

If I was earlier in my career it might have wrecked me, but luckily I realized that this was not my problem to solve. It was the problem created by living in a society that encourages straight people to ignore the uncomfortable sides of queer art in order to make it consumable. It wasn’t like my instructor had come up with the concept. Arguing with them would have been like arguing with a parrot. 

The true solution is simpler: to make art that is so intimately intwined with queer filth that it cannot be severed from its original context. Monsters can survive being misunderstood better than people can, so why waste time trying to explain my humanity to people who can't perceive it? It feels freeing to embrace the radioactivity of queer smut and live forever as a mutant, instead of dying by my own hand for nothing at all.