Tennessee Williams: Memoirs.

I did know some very obvious types in New Orleans, however, when I first "came out." There was, for instance, one whom I'll call Antoine who walked about the streets of the French Quarter with a tiny cut-glass bottle of smelling salts in liquid form and at the approach of a woman or girl, would stop and lean against a wall with the stricken whisper of "Poisson"—and sniff his counteractive vial until the lady had passed; and even then he would affect a somewhat shattered condition.

I found him hilarious, but Antoine had a serious and gifted side to him, like most of our kind... I also remember, when I returned to New Orleans after my first exposure to the more discreetly organized gay world of New York, proselytizing my "gay" friends in the Quarter to conduct themselves in a fashion that was not just a travesty of the other sex. I told them, those who would listen, that that type of behavior simply made them distasteful, sexually, to anyone interested in sex... and that it was "dated" as well.

Of course, "swish" and "camp" are products of self-mockery, imposed upon homosexuals by our society. The obnoxious forms of it will rapidly disappear as Gay Lib begins to succeed in its serious crusade to assert, for its genuinely misunderstood and persecuted minority, a free position in society which will permit them to respect themselves, at least to the extent that, individually, they deserve respect—and I think that degree is likely to be much higher than commonly supposed.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is more sensibility—which is equivalent to more talent—among the "gays" of both sexes than among the "norms."

(My other weekend reading—also in a dive bar in the San Juans—was a sign near the bathrooms listing 14 reasons why beer is better than women. "Reason #12: A beer label comes off without a fight." It made the "obnoxious forms" of gay culture that Williams diagnosed seem like a bottle of champagne and a bowl of caviar in comparison.)