The Gay Menagerie: Queer Gothic warnings of the incestuous home in ‘Red Dirt’ and ‘Dream Boy’
Tennessee Williams, the celebrated gay playwright, veiled his fears of being stuck at “home” in his work.
In The Glass Menagerie, Williams is all of the characters at once: the young writer, Tom, who feels stuck taking care of his family when he believes the world wants more for him; he is the wounded and shy sister, Laura, who fears being alone; and the mother, Amanda, who misses the beauty and bounty of her youth, as Williams did as he aged. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams explores the burden of propping up an imploding family; in what could easily become a sequel with just a few tweaks, A Streetcar Named Desire turns to look at the burden brought to the rest of the family by those who survive an implosion.
While I’m simplifying both of Williams works, and while I could include others, the underlying theme is that home is a place for abusive and emotionally incestuous relationship: gaslighting, manipulation, and feigned ignorance start at home. If you want more Williams homestead torture pieces for Thanksgiving, I recommend these lesser known gems:
- The Rose Tattoo — imagine Sunset Boulevard, in the south, and there are no actresses, just sadness.
- Orpheus Descending — extending the home to a set of neighbors, this play has everything a good southern community has: surgery gossip, theft, abortion and pregnancy (in that order), and murder.
- Suddenly Last Summer — ultimately a classic, it has fallen out of favor in recent years, but the way Williams addresses confinement (and fears of being not confined to the closet) is timeless. Don’t let it fall into obscurity.
While the queerness in Williams’ works, specifically around the “home,” warrants a longer and broader discussion, I want to look at two queer films from queer southern writers who build on Williams’ themes. Tag Purvis’s film, Red Dirt (2000), and James Bolton’s adaptation of Jim Grimsley’s novel, Dream Boy (2008). Each film takes the fear embedded in Williams’ plays and turns it into a warning about the dangers of staying home queer.
Where Williams heaped on the emotional incest, these films lay it out literally: heterosexual and consensual incest in Red Dirt, and homosexual parent-to-child rape in Dream Boy. In western psychoanalytic symbolism, incest is a ouroboros (a snake that eats its own tail) and suggests that the protagonists, by choice or by force, are caught in a loop where nothing will change as long as the circuit remains unbroken. So, for both films, the question becomes, “how does one break the cycle?”
Both films appear to reach the conclusion: get out of there! However, each develops its own strategy and final conclusion in different ways.
While Bolton softened the film significantly from its original novel form, Dream Boy is still incredibly powerful. Nathan, the protagonist, is new to a rural Louisiana town; an outsider, he befriends the slightly older neighbor, and school bus driver, Roy. Roy comes to represent everything Nathan fears and wants outside of the rape his father offers and the blind eye his mother casts. In their first sexual encounter, Nathan becomes associated with the forest when they strip to their underwear, kiss and caress. Later when Nathan flees to the forest to escape his father, he lives among the trees until night fall then sleeps in Roy’s family barn.
But Roy’s love is an imperfect love. Their lovemaking is one direction, Roy is jealous about the sexual things Nathan could have only learned at home, and Roy leads Nathan to the dramatic conclusion.
The ending is already ambiguous, but to leave the door open for you I’ll stop at saying Bolton’s warning in Dream Boy is either one of permanent escape or inescapable confinement. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
As for Red Dirt, Purvis manages to write and direct one of the best Southern Gothic stories (queer or otherwise) ever, and he wrote it before the queer public had taken up the charge against metronormativity. Not only that, but like Rimbaud, he crafted a masterpiece and vanished, leaving us a single haunting film with queer faves, Karen Black and Glenn Shadix. There are so many spoilers I don’t want to spoil on this, so to be short, Griffith took control of the family farm and all its responsibilities at the age of fourteen when the matriarch died. Much like a Williams play, the responsibilities include caring for a mentally ill aunt, maintaining a romantic relationship with his cousin (that’s the first scene, not a spoiler), and essentially watching the world succumb to entropy around him; in short, the traditional American Thanksgiving.
When a handsome stranger, Lee (Walton Goggins from Justified and The Wire), shows up the perfect swirling cesspool of incest and codependency starts to crumble in all the ways no one thought it could: skeletons are pushed out of their closets, relationships upended, and the strange immaculate purifying quality of fire breaths new life into a gothic landscape. With that being said, nothing ends the way you think it will, or how the characters think it should: promises and blood-oaths break, and every time for the better.
The beauty of these Williamsesque films lies in their warnings as much as their solutions. A close-knit family can be beautiful, but it can also be a Sarlaac Pit with hungry tentacles pulling everyone within reach back down inside the gaping maw. But these films offer other ways of being, if only until you find a place that is right for you. However, and I can’t stress this enough, no one has an obligation to be anywhere dangerous.
