Sal Mineo: The Perversion of Homosexuality
Tennessee Williams on the reality of an actor he loved and admired.
From an interview with Tennessee Williams, conducted by James Grissom, 1982. Photos below by Roddy McDowall and Kenn Duncan.
“What the world will do with us queers is unfathomable while being entirely visible, persistent, allowed. You bring up [The Rose] Tattoo, and I should be thinking of Maureen [Stapleton] and Eli [Wallach], and that verdant season, but I remember this beautiful, exuberant child named Sal Mineo. He was right on the cusp of manhood [Mineo was twelve, in 1951, when he appeared in Williams’ play], and he was beautiful and sweet, and already a victim. He was teased by the males, and coddled and adored by the females. He had the eyes of a Caravaggio giraffe—long lashes and deep wells of feeling. We bonded because he had a full and dark humor at that young age. His parents built and sold coffins, and he was once put in one of them and the lid was forced shut. His tormentors waited for screams or cries, but Sal told me he curled up and thought of a nap. He was safe in the coffin: No one could touch him.
“I stayed in touch with him and I loved him. He cared deeply about so many things: acting, art, photography, life, spirituality. Because so many had extracted sex from him either in the form of abuse or desire, sexual favors and flirtation was a currency he understood and offered most freely. I did not partake. He was always the sweet boy, and I wanted him to see himself as I did.
“Sal was not a degenerate. Sal was a gentleman, greatly misunderstood, desired, used. When he was murdered—underground and in the dark—rumors and speculation arose about his dark life and sordid associates. This is how we pervert homosexuality; this is how we allow ourselves to believe that queers invite their destinies, their deaths. A so-called merciful God exacted His judgment on Sal in the dark garage in West Hollywood, and on we go.
“Within one or two days, I awoke to the news that Sal had been murdered and that Lee J. Cobb had died, no doubt of a shattered heart. We had, ironically, in that Bicentennial year, post mortems that announced that Mineo, as a queer, deserved his slaughter, and Cobb, a Communist who had named names, was finally called to his own final judgment.
“Dark times, and I submitted to them, drank and medicated, and sought sleep.”