Tennessee Williams's Val Xavier, the itinerant sexual magnet of Orpheus Descending (1957), is immolated with a blowtorch on the night before Easter. Chance Wayne, the hustler hero of Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), is castrated on Easter Sunday. In between these two plays and acting as a queer gloss on them is the grotesque parody of the Eucharist in Sebastian Venable's crucifixion and consumption by the street urchins he has tasted in Suddenly Last Summer (1958). These three martyrs, Sebastian Venable, Val Xavier, and Chance Wayne, are sacrificed for violating their proscribed roles in the patriarchal sex/gender system. The possibility of a new sex/gender system is seen through the two central female characters in each play, one mutilated, the other healed. These plays, then, make a kind of trilogy, developing themes and characters seen in earlier plays and resolving in Williams's next dyad of quasi-religious acceptance, The Night of the Iguana (1961) and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963-64). I want to focus here on the beautiful male as sexual martyr in these three plays, on the dynamics and erotics of the martyrdoms, and on the ways in which his relationship to the fugitive woman suggests a liberating possibility. To discuss Williams's depictions of the sexlgender system, one must also examine the relationship of homosexuality and heterosexuality in Williams's work.