Tennessee Williams premiere

The conventional wisdom about Tennessee Williams, especially among politically correct detractors and gay-liberation activists, is that he was a self-loathing gay man. His homosexual characters are cloaked in heterosexual disguise, the argument goes, and so their humanity is distorted.

Now a premiere of a once-lost work, “The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer,” [playing as part of the Tennessee Williams festival in Provincetown USA] provides more evidence that Williams wrote freely about his sexual desires. Completed when he was 29, the play details his own emotional crisis after being dumped (for a woman) by the first great male love of his life, a young Canadian draft dodger named Kip Kiernan.

More from Randy Gener in The New York Times.