Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  A New York production was eventually put together elsewhere, the play paired again with Krapp’s Last Tape. It opened at the Provincetown Playhouse in January 1960. The program received respectful but mixed reviews from Brooks Atkinson in the Times and Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune (they were disturbed by the nihilism of both plays, not by the sexual undercurrents in Albee). But an absolute rave in the New York Post by Richard Watts turned the play into a hit. This was an age when New York theater was not driven by just one newspaper. The play found an audience and Albee became a star in the downtown art scene.

  More work followed, all short plays: The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox (with music by Flanagan), and The American Dream. Zoo Story continued to make its way in the world, first in a national tour, then in regional productions and in foreign translations. It even went to Argentina as part of the cultural exchange program.

  Meanwhile Albee and Flanagan had broken up. They parted on the eve of the success of Zoo Story, but remained friends. Flanagan would interview his ex for Paris Review in 1966. Sex and alcohol had created enormous problems for them as a couple—they were famous for their fights. Each soon found new boyfriends: Albee began to see a college student from Texas named Terrence McNally, who later became a playwright himself; Flanagan fell in love with Sanford Friedman, the partner of their friend Richard Howard. Couples often mix with other couples, break up and come back together in new combinations. Gay couples tend to do it more visibly and remain friends more often afterward. Yet such messy, open relationships occur in any life, gay or straight. Years later, Richard Howard could hear echoes of evenings with Albee and Flanagan in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but so did their married pal, composer Charles Strouse. “It’s like all of us talking,” Strouse told his wife. People at Wagner College on Staten Island, where Albee briefly taught, would argue that George and Martha were based on a married couple there—only they couldn’t agree on which couple.

  Albee began work on his first full-length play in 1960. Originally titled The Exorcism: or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it was initially about a husband and wife who cure themselves of their belief in a fictional lost child. But the emotional truths and role-playing that Albee added as the two-act play became a three-act play overshadowed the original concept. George and Martha fight endlessly, brilliantly, with an intimacy that turns their quarrels into a kind of lovemaking. They play games with each other and with the younger couple they invite home for a nightcap, Nick and Honey. The games have become famous: Get the Guests, Hump the Hostess, Humiliate the Host. But it’s the language that’s the real strength of the play, raucous and electric, in rapid-fire exchanges and extended monologues. The rhythm of George and Martha’s drunken exchanges is exhilarating.

  Martha: Hey, put some more ice in my drink, will you? You never put any ice in my drink. Why is that, hunh?

  George: (Takes her drink) I always put ice in your drink. You eat it, that’s all. It’s that habit you have… chewing your ice cubes… like a cocker spaniel. You’ll crack your big teeth.

  Martha: THEY’RE MY BIG TEETH!

  George: Some of them… some of them.

  Martha: I’ve got more teeth than you’ve got.

  George: Two more.

  Martha: Well, two more’s a lot more.

  These zigzag rhythms carry the play forward for three and a half hours, taking it from domestic comedy to black comedy to raw confrontation to an exhaustion that resembles peace. Under the brilliant verbal fireworks are two unhappy, three-dimensional people who are bound together in love. Love does not soften or sweeten their arguments, it only adds to their pain.

  Albee’s producers, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, were very excited by the new play and thought it would work on Broadway. They raised $75,000, but the production ended up costing only $47,000. Money was saved with such shortcuts as singing the title not to “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” which was a Disney tune, but to “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” which was in public domain. The director was Alan Schneider, who specialized in Beckett and Ionesco. The play was cast with Uta Hagen as Martha, Arthur Hill as George, George Grizzard as Nick, and Melinda Dillon as Honey.

  The play opened on a Saturday, which meant there were no reviews until Monday. The first notices were bad. “A sick play for sick people,” said the Daily Mirror. But then the good reviews started to come in, raves with reservations (the chief reservation was about the fictional child) and total raves. More than one reviewer compared the play to the best of Eugene O’Neill. People began to line up to buy tickets. Tennessee Williams attended opening night, and liked it so much he returned repeatedly the following week.

  Nobody said a word about Albee’s sexuality. Howard Taubman, in fact, despite his fear of homosexual influence, praised Virginia Woolf to the skies. “Like Strindberg, Mr. Albee treats his women remorselessly, but he is not much gentler with his men. If he grieves for the human predicament, he does not spare those lost in its psychological and emotional mazes…. It marks a further gain for a young writer becoming a major figure of our stage.”

  Virginia Woolf ran for two years. It was promptly translated into other languages: Ingmar Bergman directed a production in Sweden and another was done in Prague where it was retitled Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka? The play spoke to people everywhere. The verbal and emotional energy were only part of the appeal. The real secret of the play’s success was its subject: marriage.

  The start of the Sixties marked a new age of truth telling about married life. The old myths of domestic bliss and normalcy were now seen to be make-believe; people wanted to know how other couples actually lived. John Cheever and John Updike wrote about troubled marriage in the New Yorker; Richard Yates wrote about it in his ferocious 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road. The sophisticated team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May began to explore the rhythms of domestic spats in their comedy routines. Couples attending Virginia Woolf were fascinated to learn that their own quarrels might not be as perverse as they feared, that arguments might even be healthy, and that at least one marriage was worse than their own.

  Virginia Woolf won the Tony and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of 1963. The judges for the Pulitzer awarded the drama prize to Albee, too, but the Pulitzer board, comprised of newspaper editors from different parts of the country, overruled them. There was no Pulitzer for drama that year. Newspaper editors might have disliked the play, but theatergoers and critics loved it.

  Then the critics began to turn against Woolf. It happened slowly, imperceptibly: a growing unease with both the play and Albee. A trickle of critical remarks became a mudslide, falling not just on Albee but on all gay playwrights. Within a few years it became commonplace to dismiss Virginia Woolf as a gay play in drag.

  What happened to produce the change? At some point theater writers must have heard that Albee was gay. It’s hard to guess what was said in private based on what was published. The earliest sexual attack in print appears to have been in the spring of 1963 in the Tulane Drama Review, a prominent theater quarterly. Editor Richard Schechner wrote an editorial that appeared in the front of the issue: “The American theater, our theater, is so hungry, so voracious, so corrupt, so morally blind, so perverse that Virginia Woolf is a success…. I’m tired of morbidity and sexual perversity which are there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theater and audience. I’m tired of Albee.”

  Albee followed Virginia Woolf with an adaptation of Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers. It was well received but seen as more McCullers than Albee. His next original work didn’t open until December 1964. Tiny Alice is a very different animal from Virginia Woolf, a surrealistic comedy closer to Ionesco than to O’Neill. It’s a playful dream play about faith, religion, and theater. A Catholic lay brother is sent to the mansion of a wealthy woman, Miss Alice, and eventually marries her only to learn she is merely the symbol of the real Alice, a tiny Alice who lives in the perfect scale model of the mansion standing o
nstage. Julian is killed by a lawyer so he can join his real bride inside the model. Critics were respectful but baffled. Taubman gave it a good review, but admitted he was puzzled. Even John Gielgud, who played Julian, confessed he didn’t have a clue what it meant. Nevertheless, the play found an audience, who seemed to enjoy the giddy vertigo of confusion.

  One critic, however, wasn’t confused in the least. A young novelist, Philip Roth, reviewed the play two months into its run in a new publication, the New York Review of Books. Under the title “The Play That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” the future author of Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man called Tiny Alice “a homosexual daydream.” He attacked it for “its gratuitous and easy symbolizing, its ghastly pansy rhetoric and repartee.” Nobody reading the play today will find much “pansy rhetoric,” ghastly or otherwise, nor did the other reviewers. Roth barely describes the play itself and says nothing about the actors or the production. The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like Virginia Woolf, it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing. Roth concluded the review by demanding, “How long before a play is produced on Broadway in which the homosexual hero is presented as a homosexual, and not disguised as an angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro, or an aging actress; or worst of all, Everyman?” (Fifty years later, Roth himself wrote a novel titled Everyman about a dying, sex-obsessed Jewish heterosexual male, which presumably does qualify for universality.)

  This was only Roth’s second theater review. Nine months earlier he gave a bad review to Blues for Mr. Charlie by James Baldwin, which he found a poor imitation of a better play, The Zoo Story. He gave no hint that he even suspected Baldwin or Albee were gay. Somebody must’ve tipped him off in the meantime. I also believe he must have read a new essay by a woman that broke the code of this secret homosexuality. More about that in a moment.

  Roth’s attack opened the door for new attacks. Wilfrid Sheed, reviewing a batch of plays in Commentary in May 1965 (including the first play by Terrence McNally), wanted to see “the homosexual sensibility asserted openly in one play rather than sneaked into twenty. It would, if nothing else, leave a cleaner smell.” In the summer of 1965, the Tulane Drama Review ran a thirty-page critique of Virginia Woolf by a psychiatrist, Donald Kaplan, using it as a prime example of the infantile sexuality of “homosexual theater.” In November 1965, Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily defended homosexual theater, sort of (“The fact is that without the homosexual American creative art would be in an even sorrier state than it is now”), then called Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “perhaps the most successful homosexual play ever produced on Broadway. If its sexual core had been evident to more people it probably never would have run—even though it is perfectly exciting theater.”

  By January 1966, when Stanley Kauffmann, the new lead drama critic at the Times, wrote his now famous piece, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises,” the subject was getting pretty old. He admitted as much: “The principal charge against homosexual dramatists is well known. Because three of the most successful playwrights of the last twenty years are (reputed) homosexuals and because their plays often treat of women and marriage, therefore, it is said, postwar American drama presents a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage and society in general.” Kauffmann couldn’t name names, but he meant Williams, Albee, and William Inge, author of Bus Stop and Picnic (and another patient of psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie). Inge’s work is good, juicy, old-fashioned melodrama with no gay indicators, so it’s hard to say why he’s here, unless Kauffmann simply heard that Inge was wrestling with repressed homosexuality.

  Because Kauffmann never gives names or discusses specific plays, the piece reads like the literary equivalent of a poison pen letter. And it really is poisonous. “We have all had much more than enough of the materials presented by these three writers in question: the viciousness toward women, the lurid violence that seems a sublimation of social hatreds, the transvestite sexual exhibitionism that has the same sneering exploitation of its audience that every club stripper has behind her smile.” He trots out the now old argument that gay playwrights should be able to write about themselves—“The homosexual dramatist must be free to write truthfully of what he knows”—and not confuse matters with their masquerade. Even so, he thinks badly of gay people no matter what they do. “Homosexuals with writing ability are likely to go on being drawn to theater. It is quite the logical consequence of the defiant and/or protective histrionism they must employ in their daily lives…. But how can we blame these people? Conventions and puritanism in the Western world have forced them to wear masks for generations, to hate themselves and thus to hate those who have made them hate themselves. Now that they have a certain relative freedom, they vent their feelings in camouflaged forms.”

  The ponderous prose doesn’t hide the old-style bigotry about “these people.” There is so much nonsense in the specific charges that one doesn’t know where to begin. What is vicious about Williams’s portraits of Blanche and Maggie or Inge’s picture of Cherie in Bus Stop or even Albee’s presentation of Martha? And exactly how much time did this scholarly critic spend at strip clubs studying those “sneering” dancers? Who’s the one with misogynistic fantasies?

  During the same week as the Kauffmann article, Time magazine ran a one-page essay titled “The Homosexual in America.” As was standard with the magazine in this period, there is no byline. The essay is a stunning concentration of liberal platitudes and ugly stereotypes. “[T]he great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual’s creativity—the Leonardos and Michelangelos—are probably the exceptions of genius. For the most part… homosexuals are failed artists and their special creative gift a myth.” Yet weak as homosexual art is, it’s still seen as a terrible threat. “Homosexual ethics and aesthetics are staging a vengeful, derisive counterattack on what deviates call the ‘straight’ world. This is evident… in the ‘camp’ movement, which pretends that the ugly and banal are fun.”

  What was going on here? What did this eruption of homosexual culture panic mean and what triggered it?

  The meaning is too large and various to explore fully in a short space. Let’s just say that no sooner was Albee elevated to the pantheon of great American playwrights with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, than critics noticed that Miller was the only straight man in the bunch. It made them nervous. Miller’s best plays, Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), are the antithesis of Williams and Albee: solemn, gray, sincere, and direct. But his last play, After the Fall (1964), an autobiographical memory play with episodes from both the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, had been a critical disappointment. Albee was the first major new playwright to appear in a long, long time. It suggested that the homosexuals were taking over. The fear spread to other arts. Music was already considered a lost cause.

  One of the triggers for these attacks was an essay mentioned earlier, a surprising source that I’ve never seen fully discussed.

  As said before, it’s hard to know what writers were saying to each other in private. The New York intellectual scene of these years was very small and very parochial. These men and women were not as worldly as they pretended. They had little contact with the gay world or even with theater. But in 1964 an essay was published that told them things they didn’t know. The connection is circumstantial, but the timing is undeniable. This essay didn’t create the wave of culture panic, but I believe it was an important catalyst.

  “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag first appeared in Partisan Review that fall. Not many people saw it there, although it would’ve been read by literary intellectuals. Then Time magazine gave it five paragraphs in December 1964, the same month that Tiny Alice opened. The complaints in the later Time essay about the “ ‘camp’ movement” did not come out of nowhere. “Notes on Camp” was reprinted in Sontag’s first collection, Against Interpretation, which appeared in ea
rly 1966, in time to influence the Kauffmann essay.

  Sontag was lesbian herself, but she spent her life being coy about it. Not until she died and her son published her diaries did we learn she had always loved women. Her essay is awfully coy, too, taking forever to admit that camp is special to homosexuals and talking about gay people as if they were a lost tribe and she were only an anthropologist. “Notes on Camp” never makes clear that there are (at least) two different meanings of the word. On the one hand, camp identifies a deliberate style of gay behavior, the nelly variations of talk and movement that include female pronouns and limp wrists: “Don’t camp, darling.” On the other hand, the word identifies an approach to art best summed up in the phrase “So bad it’s good.” We can acknowledge that a movie or play or painting is terrible but still enjoy its energy or silliness or absurdity. This simple concept opens the door to complicated ideas about beauty and pleasure, success and failure, in the production of art as well as its appreciation. Gay men may have named this attitude, but it is universal. Anyone can enjoy the diverse pleasures of camp in material that ranges from Busby Berkeley dance spectacles to anthologies of bad poetry to Henri Rousseau paintings to Japanese monster movies.

  Sontag’s intentions were good: she wanted to publicize the gay presence in the arts in a positive way. “The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.” Her taxonomy is so thorough, however, that she sucks the subject dry. Also she mistakes anything that gives pleasure for camp (including Mozart and Henry James), so the term becomes meaningless. More important, many straight readers came away thinking of camp as a secret gay language, an elaborate set of inside jokes at the expense of heterosexual sincerity. I suspect this was why Philip Roth read the playful mystery of Tiny Alice as one big pansy joke. An awareness of camp now caused people to read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a gay play in disguise: after all, it begins with a husband and wife arguing about a Bette Davis movie. (They somehow forgot that Bette Davis was not just an icon for gay men but an icon for straight women who loved her toughness, as well as an icon for any admirer of serious acting. They even forgot that heterosexual couples often enjoy old movies.)