Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 11

Tennessee Williams and Sports university he attended), fearful of not passing a major examination in Greek, he revealed, “I’ll drink a couple of beers or swim a few lengths to fortify my spirit. I’m too old for the academic life” (120). Swimming continued to play a crucial role in Williams’s peripatetic life, especially his laps at various YMCAs, including one of his favorites on 63^^ Street in New York. In Camino Real, he calls the “Y” a “sort of a Protestant church with a swimming pool in it” {Letters 468). But in “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen,” a story he wrote in 1977, Williams more openly identified the “Y” as the sexualized landscape for homoerotic encounters. A rather embarrassed “physically fit” young man named Stephen in “The Killer Chicken” observed “in a guarded tone. . . that there were a lot of physical advantages to be had at the ‘Y,’ the swimming pool, and workout rooms and association with other Christian kids.” To Vi/hich his friend’s in-the-know wife, Maude, responds, “‘Steve, you’re playin’ dumb!’ [and] almost shrieked, ‘Why everyone knows that Y’s are overrun with wolves out for chickens’” {Collected Stories 555), using homosexual parlance for such assignations. The homes he owned in Key West and in the French Quarter, also had pools he used for a release. On his travels abroad to Mexico, Cuba, Paris, London, the Riviera, Greece, Tangiers, and elsewhere, swimming was a requisite and relaxing activity for the frenetic Williams. Traveling to the Isle of Capri in June 1948, Williams wrote to his friend and early lover Donald Windham that the beauty of the place “is strictly scenic but the swimming is buonissimo” {Letters to Windham 218). In several letters to one of his favorite traveling companions, Marion Black Vaccaro, Williams emphasized that any villas, apartments, or other accommodations that he might seek abroad must give him access to a swimming pool (Kolin “Term and the Banana Queen”). Essentially, of course, swimming helped Williams to be physically fit, keeping him attractive* for the many lovers and strangers whom he picked up over the decades. Leverich concluded that the sport allowed Williams to “withstand many illnesses and forms of self-abuse that otherwise would have killed him” (163). Throughout his life Williams feared he would die of a heart attack or stroke. (Interestingly enough, a young man named Donald resembling Williams in an early one-act play “Summer at the Lake” [1938-1939] possibly goes to his death by swimming so far out into the lake so he vsdll never come back to his domineering mother.) In an August 1940 letter to Joseph Kazan, a fellow “homolectual,” Williams confessed: But I see now that to grow or even to survive I must practice more discipline with myself and I am resolved to do this. I have also plunged into physical culture, swimming thirty lengths each day at the “Y” and working with weights. The motive for this is probably an ignoble desire to have a body like Kip’s {Letters 265).