Tennessee Williams, Saint Sebastian and the 'Problem' Homosexual
‘Cut this hideous story out of her brain’
In 1948 Tennessee Williams wrote the poem, San Sebastiano de Sodoma, which, as the title tells us, took as its inspiration Sodoma’s painting. Williams chose to adhere to the re-imagining of the legend, which had been steadily gaining popularity amongst gay aesthetes, namely, that Sebastian was the lover of Diocletian, the emperor who had ordered his execution. This version of events lent the story a subtext of bitchy gay power-play. At the end of the poem, Williams wonders (along with the mother of God), whether this rough-trade Sebastian is really suitable for entry into heaven; he clearly regarded the boy/saint as potential trouble.
How did Saint Sebastian die?
Arrows pierced his throat and thigh
which only knew, before that time,
the dolors of a concubine.
Near above him, hardly over,
hovered his gold martyr's crown.
Even Mary from Her tower
of heaven leaned a little down
and as she leaned, She raised a corner
of a cloud through which to spy.
Sweetly troubled Mary murmured
as She watched the arrows fly.
And as the cup that was profaned
gave up its sweet, intemperate wine,
all the golden bells of heaven
praised an emperor's concubine.
Mary, leaning from her tower
of heaven, dropped a tiny flower
but, privately, she must have wondered
if it were indeed wise
to let this boy in Paradise?
Having identified Sodoma’s Sebastian as gay, Williams seems to have become fixated on the image and upon the legend, generally. The saint’s role as gay martyr was of particular significance to him. In his poem, Williams
equates the martyrdom of St. Sebastian with the sexual acts of fellatio and sodomy. The poem's St. Sebastian is also pierced with phallic arrows in "throat and thigh," as Mary plays the role of voyeur, raising "a corner / of a cloud through which to spy." In the poem's climax, the Eucharistic chalice becomes the desecrated anal "cup," which, when pierced in an erotic act, releases its "sweet, intemperate wine," a profane analog to the communal rite.[1]
Williams was ambivalent about his homosexuality, as were the majority of gay men in the 1940s. Unlike Sodoma, Williams
took to homosexual guilt as a pig to truffles, seeing himself dragged involuntarily to some lower depths…’deviant satyriasis’ was the accusatory phrase he used to describe his own sexual activities as a young man, thereby rating his sexual desires with the bestial and demonic.[2]
Similarly, the gay men who appear in his plays are closeted and tortured by their sexuality; they enter into unsatisfactory, destructive heterosexual marriages (Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof); they commit suicide upon discovery of their guilty secret (Blanche’s off-stage husband in A Streetcar Named Desire); they are brutally murdered (Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer). There are themes of mental instability and neurosis throughout his work; Williams himself suffered from depression for much of his adult life, later becoming addicted to alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates.
Williams’ personal interest in Saint Sebastian was abiding; a decade after penning the Sodoma poem, he wrote the play, Suddenly Last Summer (1958), which had as its central (though unseen) character, a decadent poet named Sebastian Venable, and which played out aspects of the martyr story to heightened, melodramatic effect. In 1959, it was made into a film, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and starring Montgomery Clift, Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, In the early scenes, formidable Southern matriarch, Violet Venable (Hepburn), has summoned the psychiatrist, Dr. John Cukrowicz (Clift) to her home to persuade him to perform a lobotomy on her troubled niece, Catherine (Taylor), who is spreading scandalous rumours about her dead son, Sebastian, whose mysterious death she has witnessed. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that the gay Sebastian had regularly used first his mother, and later his attractive cousin, to lure heterosexual boys for sex. This is the dreadful, unspeakable secret that Violet Venable wants to stifle forever; in a chillingly vicious moment, speaking of her niece, she implores the psychiatrist to ‘cut this hideous story out of her brain.’ In the denouement, an hysterical Catherine tells the doctor about Sebastian’s fantastic, pagan death, on a Mexican beach, at the hands of street boys:
He…he was… lying naked on the broken stones...and this you won't believe! Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it! It looked as if…as if they had devoured him!...As if they'd torn or cut parts of him away with their hands, or with knives, or those jagged tin cans they made music with. As if they'd torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those gobbling mouths! There wasn’t a sound anymore…there was nothing but Sebastian…Sebastian lying on those stones…torn and crushed!
Williams directs the audience to draw a parallel between Saint Sebastian and the dead Venable; the beach, Catherine says, was ‘named for Sebastian's name saint...La Playa San Sebastian.’[3] Williams uses the notion of cannibalism as a ‘trope for the social anxiety surrounding homosexuality [which is, itself] a transgressive, ’mutually consumptive bond between men,’ which causes the collapse of reason.[4]
In her essay, ‘Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer and Euripides’ Bacchae,’ Janice Siegel finds links between the two plays:
Suddenly Last Summer resonates strongly with many of the themes and plot details of Euripides' Bacchae. Much of the action in both plays turns on the consequences of a perverse sexuality born of repression (manifested among other ways as a disturbing sexual connection between mother and son). Other shared themes include the son's search for a god he sees as a Destroyer, the irresistible pull of eros, the consequences of the psychological fragmentation of an individual, the struggle between those who seek to reveal truth and those who are determined to conceal it, and the participation of a mother in the destruction of her own child. Each male protagonist is pursued, ripped apart, and consumed by the members of a community he sexually infiltrated. The truth about each sparagmos (rending) and omophagia (raw-eating) is uncovered in similar scenes between “psychotherapist” and amnesia victim.[5]
Williams wrote the play at a time when he was undergoing, as were a great many well-heeled gay men, intensive Freudian psychoanalysis. His analyst had suggested that Williams separate from his lover, Frank Merlo, and get married in order ‘to attempt a heterosexual life.’[6]
If the notion of a prefrontal lobotomy, performed merely in order to stifle free speech and thought seems outlandish today, it should be remembered that this operation was regularly performed, from the early 1930s into the 1960s, on a wide-range of recipients, ranging from rebellious teenagers to the genuinely mentally ill. In fact, Williams’ sister Rose, diagnosed as schizophrenic at the age of twenty-six, was given a lobotomy; this resulted in her being permanently institutionalised until her death, in 1996, at the age of eighty-seven.[7] Homosexuals were also routinely operated on in this fashion; it was less than forty years ago (1973) that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic Manual of mental illness. In fact, a wide range of ‘cures’ for the ‘abnormality’ of homosexuality were eagerly pursued by the psychiatric profession.
Electroshock and pharmacologically induced shock treatments were used on homosexual patients in state hospitals and private psychiatric clinics from the 1940s through the 1960s. One common routine was to tamper with the conditioned reflex of individual male patients by showing them slides of sexy men followed by nausea-inducing drugs and then by administering testosterone before showing slides of sexy women. Other experiments included inducing anxiety about homosexuality in a patient while reducing or ‘desensitizing’ anxiety about heterosexuality. Such treatments, on the whole, were unsuccessful in ending homosexual orientation or desire.[8]
A cursory glance through the American medical literature from this period will provide ample evidence of the cavalier, even reckless, treatment of gay men at the hands of science. Consider the following few examples: Samuel Liebman’s, ‘Homosexuality, Transvestism, and Psychosis: Study of a Case Treated with Electroshock,’ in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 99, 6 (1944); Joseph W. Friedlander and Ralph S. Banay’s, ‘Psychosis Following Lobotomy in a Case of Sexual Psychopathology,’ in Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 59 (1948); J. Srnec and K. Freund’s, ‘Treatment of Male Homosexuality through Conditioning’ in International Journal of Sexology, no. 2 (1953); Moses Zlotlow and Albert E. Paganini’s, ‘Autoerotic and Homoerotic Manifestations in Hospitalized Male Postlobotomy (sic) Patients,’ in Psychiatric Quarterly 33, 3 (1959); Michael M. Miller’s, ‘Hypnotic-Aversion Treatment of Homosexual Behavior,’ in Psychological Reports 26, no. 2 (1970).
Commenting on this shameful period, Warren Johansson and William A. Percy write:
The emergence during the late nineteenth century of the medical concept of sexual inversion – supposedly more scientific and objective than the clerical concept of sodomy – meant only that instead of prison…families could have homosexuals subjected to indefinite confinement in asylums, with electroshock, prefrontal lobotomy, castration, and other forms of ‘treatment’ recommended by physicians or psychoanalysts. Supposedly all this was not only for the good of the patients but also to keep them from infecting society with their degeneracy.[9]
It is precisely this ‘degeneracy’ that Williams, who was never to be totally at ease with his sexuality, in a spirit of self-loathing, ascribes to Sebastian Venable.
To return to the film version of Suddenly Last Summer - in the early scenes, Mrs. Venable ushers Dr Cukrowicz into Sebastian’s study, from the hothouse garden of primordial, carnivorous plants. The book-filled study is crammed with the signifying tropes of the 1940s gay aesthete: a framed drawing of the back of a male nude; a mid-size canvas of a brooding dark male figure; a small Greek statue of a male torso; various theatrical masks. On the back wall is a full-length, life-size replica of Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian, of which only the bottom third can be seen. Reminiscing, Mrs.Venable tells the doctor, ‘He would sit in his chair, I in mine, at five o’clock every day and we would have our daiquiris with Saint Sebastian brooding above us.’[10]
[1] Judith J. Thompson, Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol, New York: Peter Lang, 1989, p. 104
[2] Nicholas de Jonghe, Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage, Routledge, 1992, p.95
[3] Tennessee Williams, ‘Suddenly Last Summer’, in Tennessee Williams: Four Plays, New York: Penguin, 1976, p.78
[4] Steven Bruhm, ‘Blackmailed by Sex: Tennessee Williams and the Economics of Desire’ in Modern Drama, No.34, 1991, p.533
[5] Janice Siegel, ‘Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer and Euripides’ Bacchae’ in International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 11, No. 4 / December, 2005, Springer, Netherlands.
[6] De Jonghe, p.79
[7] Williams was forever haunted by his sister’s fate. Versions of Rose appear in several of his plays. At the time of her lobotomy, Williams wrote the following blank verse in his journal: ‘Grand, God be with you. / A chord breaking. / 1000 miles away. / Rose. Her head cut open. / A knife thrust in her brain. / Me. Here. Smoking. / My father, mean as a devil, snoring – 1000 miles away.’
[8] Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society, University of Chicago Press, 1999, n. 31, p.470
[9] Warren Johansson and William A. Percy, Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence, Haworth Press, 1994, p.14
[10] In the BBC production of the play (1993), which stars Maggie Smith as Mrs. Venable, it is Guido Reni’s Sebastian (the one in Genoa - Oscar Wilde’s favourite) that graces the wall.
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