At the age of 14 I was introduced to William Inge when one Sunday my father took my mother, brother and I to see Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer in the Broadway production of "Come Black Little Sheba". An outing with the family plus the mesmerizing performance of the stars on stage stay with me until this day. I would see all his plays as they were presented on Broadway and when they were made into movies.

   





Inge, William Motter (1913-1973)
This is the forty-fifth  post in a series
highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a
few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and
nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during
an important time of
history.

Although he was closeted and created
few homosexual characters, playwright and novelist William Inge
frequently acknowledged the existence of gay culture and desire in both
his dramatic dialogue and prose.

    



Inge
is perhaps most renowned for his four successful Broadway plays, Come
Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), The Dark at
the Top of the Stairs (1957), and the Hollywood films based upon them.
Set in the American heartland of his native Kansas, each drama portrays
the domestic tensions, repressed sexuality, and conservative societal
norms that Inge associated with life in small, midwestern towns.



It was a lifestyle Inge had experienced first hand having been born,
raised, and educated primarily in Kansas, and having spent his early
career as a teacher in small towns in Kansas and Missouri.
A life-long bachelor, Inge kept careful guard over his personal life,
seeking to suppress any information that might adversely affect his
careers as a high school teacher, newspaper arts critic, and college
professor. Later, his difficulties with alcohol, his homosexuality, and
his extensive psychoanalytic therapy were cloaked in secrecy so that he
might maintain his well-crafted public image as one of the most
successful and highly respected dramatists of the 1950s.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1953 for Picnic and the
1961 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Splendor in the
Grass, Inge remained closeted throughout his career as a playwright,
screenwriter, and novelist.
He took his own life in 1973.

The Boy in the Basement, a one-act play written in the early
1950s, but not published until 1962, is Inge's only play that addresses
homosexuality overtly. This well-sketched portrait of a middle-aged
mortician who must come to grips with both his aging mother's discovery
of his homosexuality and the senseless drowning of an attractive youth
is a concise, hauntingly effective view of closeted homosexual desire
and the trauma of "coming out."

Inge included openly homosexual characters in two other plays, both written late in his career when homosexuality was more openly addressed societally and when his success as a dramatist was waning.

Most significant is Pinky in Where's Daddy? (1966), Inge's final full-length play, who eludes many gay stereotypes in Inge's presentation of him as the male protagonist's surrogate father and the play's moral center.

The other is Archie, an effeminate intellectual awaiting
execution for the murder of his mother and grandmother, who appears in
The Disposal (1967).

Elsewhere Inge often leaves the sexual orientation of characters
in question, for example, Virgil in Bus Stop, Bobby in A Loss of Roses
(1960), and Vince in Natural Affection (1963).

Despite creating relatively few homosexual literary
characters, Inge frequently acknowledged the existence of gay culture
and desire in both his dramatic dialogue and prose, often reflecting the
status of the culture at the time the works were written.

Inge's work has been virtually untouched by recent scholarly
criticism and could potentially benefit from careful gay analysis. Even
Inge's four early successes could be tapped in such an endeavor for his
overt celebration and foregrounding of both male and female sexuality,
his championing of athleticism and muscle culture, his incisive critique
of heterosexual domesticity and desire, and his close examination of
parent-child relationships.
Jay Scott Chipman