“What’s that?”
“Guinea hens roosting,” he answered.
We lingered a while, which I would have liked to prolong, but Lem, I suspect, was accustomed to more aggressive types, and he smiled and he drifted away.
It was a lonely spring. So much of my money had gone into the apartment with Abdul that I had, for a month, to live almost entirely on eggs, of which there was a surplus that season, which made them very cheap. I still like eggs, though now they’re forbidden me because of my high cholesterol count, but they do get unpalatable after a while when you have to eat them exclusively.
Then I met this marvelously lively young Irish companion and he used to take me on long canoe rides upon the river Iowa; then he would bring us to a secluded nook where we would sing Irish ballads. And there was a carnival in town and he took me there, too.
I’d lost interest in studies and so I failed that term and had to stay over for the summer term to get my degree. The summer term I was almost continually with Lomax and his lovely black girl-friend.
I felt no interest in getting a degree, I didn’t want to get out of college. We were in the depression.
Two dreadful things occurred: Rose was submitted to a lobotomy, one of the first performed in the States, and my Aunt Belle died in Knoxville, the result of an infected wisdom tooth the poison of which had permeated her system.
Aunt Ella wrote, “Your poor Aunt Belle was surrounded by a solid wall of prayer but Death got through.”
I was just beginning to write well in an individual style. I remember writing there the story “The Malediction” and a number of nice little poems.
When the summer term ended and I had my diploma, Lomax and his black girl-friend invited me to go to Chicago with them, saying that I could get on the WPA writers’ project up there. What we did was meet some fantastic black fags who were entertaining in a wild night club. I remember one particularly exuberant one who remarked, “You know, I take the sheets every trip”—meaning he loved playing the passive role in sodomy. I tried to get on that WTA project and I was rejected because I could not say my family was destitute. I had only about ten dollars to carry me through the time there, and so I had to wire home for money to get me back to the house in St. Louis County.
Clark Mills McBurney was home in St. Louis, from Paris, and we picked up our friendship; it was a lively summer. There were other friends, and picnics along the Meramec River and almost continual diversions. Dad allowed me to take out the family Studebaker a good many times: he was still trying to overcome my dreadful shyness of him. I was important to Dad because I was the namesake of his own father, Thomas Lanier Williams II.
While I’m fairly close to the subject of Iowa University, let me tell you about old E. C. Mabie, who headed the Drama Department there. For a good many years Mabie had suffered from an inoperable brain tumor that was said to be benign but that affected his behavior at times in a very erratic fashion.
He was dedicated to that great new theatre plant he’d had built on the Iowa campus and he would always attend the final rehearsal of an impending show.
One night the show about to open was in such deplorable shape that Mabie was enraged. He took off his glasses and hurled them at the actors and then he kept them rehearsing all night until the production had been revamped to suit him.
Mabie was prejudiced against me and against Lemuel Ayers. He used to hint that Ayers, who’d come as a postgraduate from Princeton, was a fag—which indeed I suspect he could have been, but a very talented and very nice fag and quite undeserving of Mabie’s persecution.
(This is parenthetical, but one night—years later, in 1943—while I was staying on the West Coast working for MGM, not working for them but receiving the salary they were legally obliged to pay me each week—Lem Ayers invited me to spend the night at his charming little house in Beverly Hills. When I woke in the morning it was to the enchanting vision of Lem, quite naked, wandering along the upstairs hall. He greeted me cordially. Of course I had my cue right in mind: “Come on in, Lem, I’ve seen you naked before.” But shyness prevented me and that last golden chance escaped me for toujours …
Lem really was about as beautiful a young man with an available disposition as I’ve ever laid eyes on, without attempting seduction—with the possible exception of … no, a bit of discretion’s in order.
How can I honestly say, “Je ne regrette rien”—in the words of the “Little Sparrow” of Montmartre … ?)
That single summer at Iowa, I was still lonely, and I took to wandering aimlessly about the streets at night to escape the stifling heat of my room. There were many great trees and the town had an old-fashioned charm. At night it almost seemed Southern. I was lonely and frightened, I didn’t know the next step. I was finally fully persuaded that I was “queer,” but had no idea what to do about it.
I didn’t even know how to accept a boy on the rare occasions when one would offer himself to me.
Yesterday, Saturday, I did a most remarkable thing for me, and one that was really delightful. In the company of a young friend, I spent about five hours strolling about Central Park, which we entered at the “gay” corner of Seventy-second and Central Park West. We bought lemon and cherry ices and we strolled out upon the area across the lake that is all but exclusively pre-empted by the homos. And they’re quite a nice and personable lot in the daytime. They have cast off, I noticed, most of the swish and camp that made them, when assembled in such numbers, unattractive to me. I enjoyed the company of the “camps” at one time when I was young and lived at the “Y.” But my closest friends, though as capable of camp as I was, then, were not the “obvious” types.
I did know some very obvious types in New Orleans, however, when I first “came out.” There was, for instance, one whom I’ll call Antoine who walked about the streets of the French Quarter with a tiny cut-glass bottle of smelling salts in liquid form and at the approach of a woman or girl, would stop and lean against a wall with the stricken whisper of “Poisson”—and sniff his counteractive vial until the lady had passed; and even then he would affect a somewhat shattered condition …
I found him hilarious, but Antoine had a serious and gifted side to him, like most of our kind. He was not a brilliant painter but he had a distinctive and highly effective flair which later made him a successful designer in New York.
I remember an evening when Antoine, who had a charmingly decorated apartment on Toulouse, presented his production of Four Saints in Three Acts—the cast all homosexuals—and they did not camp it but presented it with true style and it was the best evening of Stein I’ve yet experienced.
I also remember, when I returned to New Orleans after my first exposure to the more discreetly organized gay world of New York, proselytizing my “gay” friends in the Quarter to conduct themselves in a fashion that was not just a travesty of the other sex. I told them, those who would listen, that that type of behavior simply made them distasteful, sexually, to anyone interested in sex … and that it was “dated,” as well.
Of course, “swish” and “camp” are products of self-mockery, imposed upon homosexuals by our society. The obnoxious forms of it will rapidly disappear as Gay Lib begins to succeed in its serious crusade to assert, for its genuinely misunderstood and persecuted minority, a free position in society which will permit them to respect themselves, at least to the extent that, individually, they deserve respect—and I think that degree is likely to be much higher than commonly supposed.
28. Dakin and mother outside one of our apartment in St. Louis.
29. Dakin and me by a small country club swimming pool.
30. Back of our home on Aberdeen Place in St. Louis.
31. Dakin, planning a political future.
32. Grandfather in the living room of our house on Arundel Place.
33. In Venice, 1928—the group Grandfather took to Europe. I’m left out of this picture.
34. On the deck of the S.S Homeric, bound for Europe.
&nb
sp; 35. A sweet picture of Rose.
36. 53 Arundel Place, Clayton, Missouri.
37. Grandfather and Grand in St. Petersburg, Florida.
38. Rose at the sanitarium, with “Jiggs.”
39. Grandfather Dakin’s graduation photo
40. In the state of innocence—and Mississippi.
41. On Ozark holiday. I’m on the left.
42. Dakin and me outside the summer cabin in the Ozarks.
43. At a swimming hole in the Ozarks.
44. On Arundel Place, about the time I graduated from high school.
45. In Clayton living room.
46. Dakin and me in the Ozarks, Jerome, Missouri, August 1929.
47. Trying to be a writer—1939.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is more sensibility—which is equivalent to more talent—among the “gays” of both sexes than among the “norms” …
(Why? They must compensate for so much.)
Continuing along this happy mood of self-congratulation, I find that I’ve established or am in the process of establishing, a sort of personal following in New York. For instance, yesterday I stopped with a friend at a small and expensive men’s shop. I found a beautiful copper-colored cotton-and-polyester suit that fit me with little alterations to be made. When I produced my charge-card the proprietor made a great fuss over me and, to prove its sincerity, he made me a gift of a thirty-dollar silk tie that went perfectly with the suit. I shall have on both at my appearance on the “Midday” talk show this coming Wednesday with Candy Darling, to promote Small Craft Warnings.
Despite my totally exhausted state after the night-owl show, at 10 P.M., of Small Craft Warnings, I went out with our star, Helena Carroll, to meet Donald Madden, the only actor beside Brando—no, that’s not true, Michael York has now joined the select, making it a trio—for whom I have “written plays,” or at least parts in plays, more than once. You see, I was still capable of falling in love in the sixties, and during the rehearsals of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel—despite my condition, which was verging on mental and physical collapse—I was “mad about the boy,” Madden, but refrained from declaring it as he was involved in my work.
My feeling toward Madden has now settled sensibly into a platonic one based upon my very deep regard for him as an actor. I think there’s no better actor in the States … (Perhaps Michael Moriarty will challenge that pre-eminence someday.)
4
I want to tell you about another pivotal love in my life, after Hazel and Sally, the first great male one. In the early summer of 1940 my friend Paul Bigelow put me on a train to Boston, whence I was to go to Provincetown, a place I’d barely heard of. I had finally managed to arbitrate from the Theatre Guild a regular Dramatists Guild contract for Battle of Angels in place of the half-rate “understanding” which they’d offered in the beginning: which means my preproduction stipend was now a hundred dollars a month instead of fifty. And I felt quite affluent. But Bigelow thought I’d best get out of town. In those days people were always putting me on trains or buses like I was a pawn in a chess game. Well, I must have wanted it that way. And that’s the way I got it. How very kind they were to me, in those long ago days! That I do mean, you know …
From Boston I took the daily boat to P-town and there, the first few days, I stayed in a rooming-house, a charmingly casual old frame building with a swing on the verandah. The house was tenanted by equally charming and casual young people. There was a blond youth who succumbed to my precipitate courtship the first evening.
Yes, you see, now I had finally come thoroughly out of the closet; I was not a young man who would turn many heads on the street, this being before the vogue of blue jeans and T-shirts, which would have been to my advantage, since I had a good swimmer’s physique. The pupil of my left eye had turned gray with that remarkably early cataract. And I was still very shy except when drunk. Oh, I was quite the opposite when I had a couple of drinks under the belt.
(In those days I used to cruise Times Square with another young writer who would prefer to remain unmentioned by name in this context, and he would dispatch me to street corners where sailors or GIs were grouped, to make very abrupt and candid overtures, phrased so bluntly that it’s a wonder they didn’t slaughter me on the spot. I would just go up to them and say, [Deleted by author]—sometimes they mistook me for a pimp soliciting for female prostitutes and would respond, ‘Sure, where’s the girls?’—and I would have to explain that they were my cruising partner and myself. Then, for some reason, they would stare at me for a moment in astonishment, burst into laughter, huddle for a brief conference, and, as often as not, would accept the solicitation, going to my partner’s Village pad or to my room at the “Y.”)
Surely this adequately covers, to say the least, the deviant satyriasis with which I was happily afflicted in those early Manhattan years of my life. Sexuality is an emanation, as much in the human being as the animal. Animals have seasons for it. But for me it was a round-the-calendar thing.
I wonder, sometimes, how much of the cruising was for the pleasure of my cruising partner’s companionship and for the sport of pursuit and how much was actually for the pretty repetitive and superficial satisfactions of the act itself. I know that I had yet to experience in the “gay world” the emotion of love, which transfigures the act to something beyond it. I have known many gays who live just for the act, that “rebellious hell” persisting into middle life and later, and it is graven in their faces and even refracted from their wolfish eyes. I think what saved me from that was my first commitment being always to work. Yes, even when love did come, work was still the primary concern.
During the summer of 1940, the first month of it, in Provincetown, at the frolicsome tip of the Cape, I had encountered the blond kid on the verandah of a frame rooming-house. There is a magic about a frame rooming-house with a verandah and a porch swing, whether it be North or South. And it is l’heure bleue, so flattering to blonds.
I have seated myself beside the blond kid on the front porch swing. The dusk obscures my opaque iris of the left eye, and I don’t think it took me more than ten minutes to convince him, despite his protestations of being “straight,” that his life would not be complete until he’d passed an evening in my embrace.
(There’s a line in Streetcar which belongs to Blanche. Mitch has told her he’d thought that she was “straight,” and she has replied, “What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains!”)
Lechery possessed me, still under thirty, that summer of 1940. And it was approaching a climax.
The blond kid was just a one-night lay, an evanescent bit of trivial music.
However …
It must have been only two or three days later that I encountered Kip on Captain Jack’s Wharf in P-town.
Some casual acquaintance took me to the wharf one noonday, clear and blue. At the stove of a little two-story shack on this wharf built on stilts over the incoming, outgoing tides was the youth to whom I dedicated my first collection of short stories. He had his back to me, as I entered, since he was facing the stove, up-stage, preparing clam chowder, New England style, the dish on which he and his young (platonic) friend Joe were subsisting that summer through economic need. He was wearing dungarees, skin-tight, and my good eye was hooked like a fish. He was too preoccupied by the chowder-cooking to more than glance over his shoulder and say “hello.” The other tenant of the shack was a youth named Joe who was into Oriental dancing. Kip was into modern dancing. And when he turned from the stove, I might have thought, had I been but a little bit crazier, that I was looking at the young Nijinsky. Later he was to tell me, with a charmingly Narcissan pride, that he had almost the same bodily dimensions of Nijinsky, as well as a phenomenal facial resemblance. He had slightly slanted lettuce-green eyes, high cheekbones, and a lovely mouth. But I will never forget the first look I had at him, standing with his back to me at the two-burner stove, the wide and
powerful shoulders and the callipygian ass such as I’d never seen before! He didn’t talk much. I think he felt my vibes and was intimidated by their intensity.
It was only a few days later that Joe and Kip invited me to share their two-story shack on Captain Jack’s Wharf in P-town. A cot was provided for me downstairs, alongside Joe’s.
The wharf was fully occupied. A few doors away was an attractive girl in her late twenties who invited us to dinner one evening. Her radio played “Sweet Leilani.” It blew my mind. I remember that cornily seductive Hawaiian song—and a bit later Kip and I were alone in the downstairs of the two-story shack and I, with crazed eloquence, was declaring to him my desire. He was silent a few moments and then said, “Tom, let’s go up to my bedroom.”
The bedroom was a small loft with a great window that held in it all one half of the night sky.
No light was turned on or off as Kip removed his clothes. Dimly, he stood there naked with his back to me.
After that, we slept together each night on the double bed up there, and so incontinent was my desire for the boy that I would wake him repeatedly during the night for more love-making. You see, I had no sense in those days—and nights—of how passion can wear out even a passive partner.
And just at this time my old habit of blushing when looking into the eyes of another person came back and it was a torment that made the days difficult but was exorcised by the fog-dimmed nights in the bedroom-loft.