When a Door Is a Jar, or out in the Theatre

Tennessee Williams represents a test case of the way the closet has been treated in gay theatre criticism, a criticism that has tended to replicate the very closet structure it deplores. In a way, the theatre has always been complicitous with the closet, as a privileged, protected space where gay culture traditionally has been very much at home. Gay criticism on Williams, emerging over the last ten years or so, has described his work variously as homophobic and closeted, subversive and even radical.2 Yet all of these criticisms hinge on the inside/outside distinction, perhaps the overriding trope in gay and lesbian criticism and theory. For example, most of Williams's gay critics consider his fiction and poetry to be more than his drama, although they suggest that fiction and poetry are more private, closeted genres than drama. This puts pressure on Williams to come out in the theatre--presumably conceived as a more open, more public writerly space--and suggests that the theatre itself is already of the closet. To be out as a writer is thus to be precisely there, in that public space. Of course the logic of inside/outside has already, at this stage, moved somewhat

Art · Art history · JAR · Operating system · Queer · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Gender Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Poetry Analysis and Criticism