It may come as a surprise that in elementary school the subject that I hated most was ‘Language’ ~ that’s what we used to call English or grammar. It was the subject in which we would have to write, and I loathed it. Math came much more easily to me, and science was much more interesting. Words and grammar were too abstract and dry for me to grasp. While it was a chore, I usually excelled at writing, and like most things we initially fight against and reject, it eventually became my cherished love. That didn’t happen until high school, however, when we finally got to read some good shit, starting with ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and, later that freshman year, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ I didn’t realize that it was a love of language and words and how adroitly they could bring us into other realms that was working its magic ~ I simply loved the escapism of a book or play. Whenever I would lie awake in bed at night worrying about the next day of school, I could open a book and escape, albeit briefly, into a different place where I only had to observe and experience. I didn’t have to talk to anyone, I didn’t have to engage, I had only to watch and feel and travel safely as spectator. Wracked by social anxiety and depression, I found safety in the world of the written word. It didn’t even matter that so much of those words escaped my notice, that so many layers of meaning went unnoticed and unprocessed by my young mind. It was enough to simply exist somewhere other than within the reality in which I found myself.
It was fantasy.
It was play.
It was survival.
When the brutality of being a fourteen-year-old gay boy became too much ~ and simply existing in those days sometimes felt like too much ~ the words of a writer like Tennessee Williams called to me, beckoning me to keep going, to keep pushing into a world that might one day offer succor and salvation, even when it felt like no one was there to help.
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” ~ Tennessee Williams
“You haven’t said a word about my appearance… Daylight never exposed so total a ruin.” ~ Tennessee Williams
“Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the most unforgivable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.” ~ Tennessee Williams
“When I was sixteen, I made the discovery — love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me.” ~ Tennessee Williams
“These are love-letters, yellowing with antiquity, all from one boy…..Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t! I’m not young and vulnerable anymore.” ~ Tennessee Williams
“…most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling.” ~ Tennessee Williams
“Physical beauty is passing – a transitory possession – but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart – I have all these things – aren’t taken away but grow! Increase with the years!” ~ Tennessee Williams
{See Part One here.}
