The Time and World That I Live In

Police harassment, surveillance, and arrest; gay men incarcerated in violent wards; a government-sanctioned, systematic drive to hound homosexuals from their jobs: This was the atmosphere in which Williams wrote Camino Real. While problematic as a play, Camino Real is also an important document in the history of gay characters in American drama. At the height of a period unprecedented in its fear, paranoia, and homo-phobia, Tennessee Williams created an openly gay character for a play to be produced commercially on Broadway. Moreover, all of the damning comments of latter-day critics notwithstanding, only Tennessee Williams, among all his contemporaries, presented on a Broadway stage the image of an unashamed, democratic, and unvarnished gay man, ex-pert in the sorts of sexual habits that seem to make recent critics (even the gay ones) as uncomfortable, even as homophobic, as any 1950s cop, politician, or commentator.