Customer Reviews

Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama

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This book is kind of a mixture. Partly it's a biographical sketch of Tennesee Williams, partly it's a review of the struggles gay and lesbian people had during the 1940's and '50's, partly it's an analysis of the homosexuality in Williams plays, partly it's an analysis of the critics writing about his plays. And all of that is a lot to put in one rather small book.

Strangely enough, even with all that in the book, Mr. Paller pulls it off quite well. He is able to describe the gay-bashing of the time, and the tremendous internal struggles that this created in Williams. His descriptions of the critics analysis of the plays tells us a lot about the critics themselves, more about them than the plays.

It's too much to say that this is a book that you can't put down. Instead I found it's a book that you read for a while, and then you want to think about what you've read before you go on.

Tennessee Williams is probably America's foremost playwright. Some like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and more are still among the best plays ever done. The anguish in the writer in facing first his own discovery of his homosexuality and then finding it in the opressive eyes of the time make for quite a story.

Gentlemen Callers is a penetrating look at the work of Tennessee Williams in the context of his homosexuality and the pervasive homophobia in the midst of which he grew up and created some of the most moving and significant works of drama in the English language. Gentlemen Callers describes in all its chilling reality the emergence of intense homophobia in the mid-20th century, intentionally fostered by government agencies, and discusses how this homophobia impacted his life and his work. Author Paller makes a particular effort to point out the wrongmidedness of latter day gay liberationist critics who pilloried Williams for supposedly creating characters from an internalized homophobia, criticism which failed to appreciate the process of artistic creation and the characters themselves in their dramatic settings. Paller analyzes a number of the most developmentally significant of Williams' plays in the light of the homosexuality that was such an important motif in his oeuvre. Gentlemen Callers is an engaging study, and the most substantial examination of this writer in the context of the homosexuality that so signficantly informed his work.

I had read Lyle Leverich's Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams several years ago and consider it the definitive biography of the playwrights (or at least of his early years), so I figured I'd be fairly well acquainted with all the information in Paller's Gentlemen Callers. But I quickly discovered Paller could still surprise me.

Gentlemen Callers is a hybrid of a book - part biography, part social history. If you're looking for biographical info on Williams, stick to his biographies; but if you want to understand how he went from the writer of the lyrical "Glass Menagerie" and the ground-breakingly frank "Streetcar Named Desire" to the "failed" playwright of his later years, this is the book you want to read.

Growing up in the '70s, I remember Williams having a reputation as a washed up writer with a drug and alcohol problem. He was also one of the only "out" celebrities I was aware of. Williams spanned the time from when homosexuality still was mostly "the love that dare not speak its name" to the post-Stonewall years of gay liberation. Paller's book shows how Williams' own gay identity played a role in his plays (even when homosexuality was only a subtext rather than an open theme). I'm grateful that Paller produced this book. It has helped me understand how Tennessee Williams went from being ahead of his times in the '40s and '50s to being behind the times during the turbulent '60s and '70s. Truly a fascinating read!

So much of the critical reaction to the work of Tennessee Williams was colored by the prevailing social attitudes toward homosexuality. Michael Pallers GENTLEMEN CALLERS: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY DRAMA provides a fascinating critical study of Williamss work in the context of his sexual orientation and the particular time in which he lived. In the 50s he was criticized for being too gay. By the 1970s, he was criticized for being not gay enough and was labeled as a self-loather. Mr. Pallers book puts the arguments into perspective and provides a calm, well-documented argument that Williams never denied that he was gay and never wrote male characters disguised as females. He presented the American theatre of the 1950s only unapologetically gay character in CAMINO REAL. While the unsavory homosexual character in his grim 1970 play SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS was such a smoking gun for the scathing criticism of Williams from gay critics, Paller convincingly argues that the heterosexual characters in that play fare no better.

Parts of the book I consider brilliant, especially the section analyzing Williams's neglected one-act "Something Unspoken," which portrays a power struggle between two latent lesbians. (Now I want to see this play performed!) This section alone makes the book essential reading for any serious scholar of Williams's work, but the whole book offers one eye-opening passage after another. I would highly recommend this book to any theatre artist planning to direct or act in a Williams play as well as to lovers of Williams's work in general. Five stars.

Outside of the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire, or reading the script for Glass Menagerie in high school, I've never had any connection to Tennessee Williams. Sadly, I have never seen one of his plays on stage either except for a horrible version of Camino Real that I don't count.

But I still have always been intrigued by him both as a playwright and as a homosexual. A recent trip to his grave, right here in my hometown of St. Louis, got me wanting to learn more about him. So, I picked up this book in a local used bookstore and read it in about a week.

It's pretty dry reading, and lost my attention at times since I wasn't acquainted with most of Williams' work. At times, Paller goes on and on about the latent and hidden homosexual characters or themes of various plays of Williams, but he balances this with an almost microscopic look into where Williams was in his life while he was writing the play. We see how Williams took the events in his own life and turned it into art. It inspired me to want to know more.

Paller also gives the reader a glimpse into how society was treating homosexuals at the time as well - from science and medicine, to psychology and even the military. We get a very detailed look into what life was like for Williams as a homosexual through the 50s and 60s.

Part biography, part history, and part theatre review, the book offers up a nice detailed account of the man Williams was and the work he created.