On Thornton Wilder and His Closet

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was born in Madison, Wis., a town of only 18,000 residents at that time - the typical sort of "our town" he later immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Thornton Wilder performing as the Stage Manager in Our Town, 1950

Financial difficulties (Thornton's father was part-owner of an unsuccessful newspaper) drove Wilder Senior to seek a new, more lucrative career, and in 1906, he succeeded in persuading President Taft, an old college friend, to appoint him consul general of Hong Kong. The family moved there briefly, but Thornton's mother didn't like life abroad and moved back to the United States with her children. Thornton spent the rest of his adolescence in another small town, Berkeley, Calif.

Young Wilder attended Thacher, a boys' boarding school, where he was taunted by classmates as a "freak." At Thacher, Wilder discovered his love of the theater and delighted in the school's dramatic club. But when he was cast as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilder's father - fearing the meaning of his son's effeminate ways - stepped in and forbade him to play female roles. Painfully aware of his difference from other boys, Wilder early on described himself as "a queer pupil" with a "queer walk."

As a teenager in Berkeley, Wilder began writing stories and plays. He confessed dramatically in his journal that if he wasn't writing he had "no right to breathe." In college, he continued to pursue both writing and the theater, first at Oberlin, where he wrote poetry to a favorite male professor, and then at Yale, where he became infatuated with a young actor. "Sheer genius and poetry," Wilder wrote to describe Gareth Hughes. "And when his glasses are off the divinest thing to look upon that I have ever seen."

In the way of many closeted queers, Wilder was intensely homophobic. He once commented to Gore Vidal that "a writer ought not to commit himself to a homosexual situation of the domestic sort" because it would damage his career. As a result, Wilder's love life consisted mostly of infatuations, often with actors (including the young Montgomery Clift), and brief sexual encounters (most famously with writer Samuel Steward). Wilder would have hated my play Their Town, which addresses his sexuality. He believed that to speculate on the sexuality of famous writers was simply to "whip up a prurient oh-ha! in millions of people."