Blackmailed by Sex: Tennessee Williams and the Economics of Desire

Blackmailed by Sex: Tennessee Williams and the Economics of Desire STEVEN BRUHM In 1951, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published a book entitled Washington Confidential. One of its chapters, called "A Garden of Pansies," had a dire warning for patriotic Americans: "With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more disloyal than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can be blackmailed or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional citizens; they are far more intense about their love-life."1 Now, Lait and Mortimer have two problems here which, while not particular to McCarthy's America, are epitomized by it. The fIrst is one of anonymity: 6,000 in office, they say, and "One cannot snoop at every desk and count people who appear queer. Some are deceptive to the uninitiated.'" And this anonymity poses the larger threat of potential blackmail: because homosexuals have a secret, they are willing to hide it at any cost. What's worse, they may be willing to sell the goods on someone else, ifthe price is right. Because that price is national security, the homosexual poses a threat to 1950S cold-war America that is unmatched in that country's history. When Lait and Mortimerattempt to weed their garden ofpansies, they equate homosexuality with political sedition. This is as it's always been. The interdiction of sex between men, as it comes to us from Leviticus. was grounded in Israel's developing need to assure a plentiful supply of soldiers and tribesmen. (As well, it kept out Babylonian influence: homosexuality is never considered an indigenous product; it's always imported.3) Furthermore, Lait and Mortimer specify afinancial element in that sedition.lfhis, too, is as it's always been. In Judeao-Christian thought, homosexual acts denied the use-value of semen, equating non-procreative sex with misuse ofnatural resources. The wasted seed directly affected national stability by refusing to follow its naturally reproductive function - it refused to pay its debt to the nation. And that tradition of fInancial management has continued throughout Western history. As Eve Kosofsky (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 528 Williams and the Economics of Desire Sedgwick's work has emphasized, male bonds are essential to the enormous web of western capitalist relations; because of this, what she calls the homosocial bond has always been promoted and protected.' But it has also been policed: within that system of bonds, genital contact has always been condemned . Men can do lunch, but never breakfast. Given this, the stakes are particularly high for McCarthy's America: the homosexual is by definition a threat to national security because he harbors a secret which is linked to economic imbalance, and which makes his behaviour transgressive. And this is the context within which Tennessee Williams is writing, a context which, as I hope to show, is helpful for discussing his 1958 play, Suddenly Last Summer. With the historical link between homosexuality and political stability, it is both ironic and understandable that the city has become a Mecca for gay men. Ironic because it puts them at the heart of political activity, understandable because the city offers safety in numbers: homosexuals can both fade into a larger, impersonal mass and find sexual pleasure within that mass. Such was the city of New Orleans for Tennessee Williams when he first came to it in 1938. "I found the kind of freedom I had always needed", he wrote of New Orleans. "And the shock ofit against the puritartismofmy nature has given me a subject, a theme, which I have never ceased exploiting.'" Thomas Richardson argues, then, that the city of New Orleans, particularly at night, represented an exotic, and erotic, fantasy world which Williams exploited in his plays to contrast the realism of the city by day. That contrast between sexual freedom and political stability, with their apparent incompatibility, is exactly what Williams found in the geographical layout ofNew Orleans, the seoing for Suddenly Last Summer. According to Richardson, Williams was particularly struck by ... the sense of division between the business world dominated by the American spirit and the exotic world of the Vieux Carre.... The...