Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 70

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Popular Culture Review

its African origins, and perhaps its visual similarity to a leading indicator of the
gay cancer. Yaws was poetic for his literary purposes even if it wasn’t absolutely
accurate. ‘‘Mother Yaws” can be read as Williams’s outcry about what happens to
someone who contracts this pernicious “gay cancer.” As he often did in his plays,
Williams used plots about heterosexual couples to conceal gay agendas and fictions
(Savran). The doctor informs Barle that “[i]t’s going to be a slow thing. That’s
about all we can tell you except that it is a rare disease that usually happens in
Africa. Have you been to Africa?” (Williams 549). The geographic, evolutionary
malice of AIDS seems to threaten. Barle’s “terrible sore” might well be the dreaded
Kaposi’s sarcoma, the mark of “young homosexual men in the United States and
Denmark” (Jorgenson). Williams may have even seen individuals with this “AIDSdefining illness” (“Kaposi’s sarcoma”) in his travels and/or in New York. He would
later lose two close friends to AIDS—Bill Barnes, his publisher at New Directions
and a poet companion named “Angel” (Hale). And during the early 1980’s Williams
signed his name to a fund-raising drive to help AIDS victims.
The fact that terror grips everyone whom Barle encounters anticipates
what so many AIDS victims would face. Sadly, wh en evicted from the waiting
room, Barle asks if she can at least take her chair with her outside: “A man took a
blue handkerchief out of his pocket, and using it to protect the hand from the
contact with the chair, hauled it outside” (Williams 548). The color blue participates
significantly in the symbolism of the story, for when the doctor tells Barle that he
has to make arrangements at the hospital “because a condition like yours needs
several days of examination and tests. You got Blue Cross?” Barle innocently
answers: ‘T got blue cross. Is that what this is?” (Williams 549). This undefined
cancer is indeed a blue cross. It is another example of a blue disease—the most
serious of all— in the Williams canon. Laura Wingfield, Williams’s fictionalized
sister in the Glass Menagerie, suffered from “blue roses” or pluerosis. But Barle’s
blue cross is far heavier, more deadly. In his color psychology, Williams links
these victimized women in a lyrical, but traumatizing, color. Interestingly enough,
accompanying the story when it came out in Esquire was a photo by Larry Robins
showing Barle, looking out a window, in a blue dress with lace collar and cuffs and
a flowered apron.
In “Mother Yaws,” Williams, I believe, offers a medical document of
horrific proportions. This almost completely neglected short story might well contain
one of the first popular, literary references to the “gay cancer”—Kaposi’s sarcoma.
Based upon clinical evidence in the story, Barle’s dilemma might well be read as a
parable of an AIDS victim. As if living in a Biblical world with her uncleanness,
Barle confronts bad Samaritans everywhere, at home, at church, in institutions
founded to give care, even in nature. Being consumed by a suspicious, protective
mother wildcat, Barle is reduced to a victim in an apocalyptic world, human and