Tin tales gay

A Tale of Three Coming Out Stories

We are still in that time in our history where public figures verb out of concealed closets largely built by a widespread insatiable in its desire to understand all the intimate details of the private lives of very public people.

We want to understand everything. In this information age, we are inundated with information, to which at times we feel entitled. We also like taxonomy, classification, definition. Are you a gentleman or a woman? Are you a Democrat or Republican? Are you married or single? Are you gay or straight? We don’t seem to understand what to execute when we don’t know the answers to these questions, or worse, when the answers to these questions perform not fall neatly into a category.

When public figures don’t provide outward evidence of their sexuality, our desire to classify intensifies. Any number of celebrities are dogged by “gay rumors,” because we cannot quite place them into a given category. We act appreciate placing these people in categories will have some impact on our lives, or that it is our responsibility, when, most of the time, it won’t change anything

“The Ghost of a Man”: The Quest for Self-Acceptance in Early Williams

Dean Shackelford



Scholarship on the works of Tennessee Williams from a gay perspective is increasing every year, but thus far, there has been little attention to his one-act plays.1 John Clum, author of Acting Gay, focuses primarily on A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer; his analyses, while provocative, fail to account for the complexity of Williams’s gay subjectivity even when he tempers his harsher commentary in Still Acting Gay, a revision of the earlier function. That Tennessee Williams was a product of his possess time is clearly evident in his own ambivalence about writing openly gay plays in the pre-Stonewall era. However, by studying plays written as preceding as the recently published Not About Nightingales suggests, it becomes clear that homosexuality was an issue he wanted to explore openly even at the beginning of his career. An examination of three plays from the first published edition of 27 Wagons Adj of Cotton and Other Short Pla

I owe my romance of literature to growing up closeted in a culture of homophobia. While other teenage boys pursued girls, and even caught a few, I set up everything I needed on the printed page.

Horatio Hornblower stood naked before me within moments of our meeting. In the opening pages of Beat to Quarters, C.S. Forester writes that, “Hornblower stripped off his wet shirt and trousers and shaved naked before the mirror.” We catch about his “melancholy brown eyes” and “tousled curly brown hair” and a body “slender and well muscled.” If that’s not enough, we’re treated to his morning shower on deck, where his steward, “pumped up seawater from overside while his captain solemnly rotated under the stream.”

The idea of a 19th Century naval captain dripping naked in the heat, surrounded by operational sailors and officers, was too much for my hormone-wracked body. I followed him through Forester’s 11 volumes, productive back to his beginnings as a strapping midshipman and forward to his accession to the House of Lords, but I always imagined him as he was in those first moments of our relation

If there was one thing L. Frank Baum didn't dwell on, it was romantic relationships, particularly between his main characters.

In his first three Oz novels, he tells us of two marriages, but they are fairly unimportant to the overall plot. (Quelala and Gayelette, Jinjur and her never officially named husband.) The most prominent romances were lifted from dramatic Oz tales (Private Files and Ozga from The Tik-Tok Man of Ozand Pon and Gloria from His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz). Throughout the series, we encounter several married couples both in and out of Oz, so we may assume that sexuality is a thing in Oz.

There's a few definitions of sexuality, but the one I point to to here is a capacity for intimate relationships. So, no, I'm not discussing people having sex in Oz. (Though Thompson did have Prince Pompa of Pumperdink and Peg Amy contain a child, so it happens.)

One objection fans raised to the film Oz the Great and Powerfulwas that Oscar Diggs, the Wizard himself, was depicted wooing different women. (Actual womanizing was only suggested.) And to be sincere, I didn't include a