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- Title
Stonewall Offstage: Recontextualizing Tennessee Williams's Small Craft Warnings.
- Authors
Sakai, Takashi
- Abstract
In 1972, three years after the Stonewall Riots, Tennessee Williams's "first openly gay" play Small Craft Warnings was staged at the Off-Broadway Truck and Warehouse Theatre. This ambitious effort relied on the queer presence of Candy Darling, a trans actress who played the role of Violet, and on meta-theatricality. Opposing the triumphalist and confrontationist view of gay liberation in the early 1970s, the play attempts to rescue stigmatized queer subjects and represent their love lives as a rich source of alternative human relationships. Williams seeks to broaden the scope of gay partnership by positively describing the cross-generational relationship between homosexuals, and by challenging the view that such relationship is pederasty or pedophilia. The queer world depicted in the play is not outmoded; it emerges, without getting entangled in official discourse on gay pride in the post-Stonewall era, and without irony, as a brave new world.
- Subjects
STONEWALL Riots, New York, N.Y., 1969; WILLIAMS, Tennessee, 1911-1983; SMALL Craft Warnings (Theatrical production); DARLING, Candy; GAY male relationships; LESBIAN relationships
- Publication
Journal of Modern Literature, 2021, Vol 45, Issue 1, p150
- ISSN
0022-281X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/jmodelite.45.1.10