Gentlemen Callers provides a fascinating look at America's greatest twentieth-century playwright. Michael Paller examines Tennessee Williams's plays from the 1940s through the 1980s against the backdrop of the playwright's life story and the culture in which he worked, providing fresh details. Through this lens Paller examines the evolution of mid-twentieth-century America's acknowledgment and acceptance of homosexuality. From the early one-act Auto-da-Fe and The Glass Menagerie through Small Craft Warnings and Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Paller's book investigates how Williams's earliest critics marginalized or ignored his gay characters and why, beginning in the 1970s, many gay liberationists reviled them. Lively, blunt, and provocative, this book will appeal to anyone who loves Williams, Broadway, and the theater.