“I look into their myriad eyes”: The Queer Gaze of Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs

This article scrutinizes the various bodies of Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs (1975) by examining the corporeality of the text itself. When faced with his own queerness, the dramatist consistently spasms and vomits. This nausea, I argue, is connected with the “horrors” of femininity that Williams exiles for the sake of a masculine identity; he gags and heaves as an involuntary form of self-reproach. Such moments of abject repudiation—often accompanied by temporal shifts and narrative incoherencies—give shape to the autobiography. Williams’s body thus betrays his queerness. Memories of Kip (Kiernan) and Frank Merlo—the dramatist’s first and “most long-lasting” lovers, respectively— ultimately frustrate Williams’s desire to differentiate from his “swishy” supporting characters. The autobiography—in spite of its author’s anxieties—tasks the reader to acknowledge the presence of the two lovers’ lives in Williams’s personal history.