When 28 year-old Tom Williams finally left his parents' Missouri home, he headed for New Orleans, for a new life as a writer, a newly-realized sexual identity as a homosexual, even a new first name: Tennessee. As he describes it in his Memoirs, the exchange of his mother's "monolithic puritanism" and the middle-class Midwest for the bars and bohemians of New Orleans was a late coming of age, as a person and a writer. ... FULL STORY »
