America on Film

Chapter 14

HETEROSEXUALITY, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD

Just as socio-cultural ideas about race, class, and gender have evolved over the past century and affected the ways that those aspects of identity are represented on screen, so have depictions of sexuality evolved throughout the years. While this part of the book focuses primarily on how representations of homosexuality were manufactured before, during, and after the classical Hollywood studio era, these chapters will also recognize how images of heterosexuality have been constructed by film texts. Like whiteness or masculinity, heterosexuality has often been hard to “see” because it has been naturalized by patriarchal ideologies as being the “normal” state of affairs. (In fact, the study of heterosexuality – and how it relates to other social issues such as race, class, gender, and ability – is just now beginning to be undertaken within the humanities.) This chapter first reviews the heterosexual biases of Hollywood film form, then examines how homosexuality was represented in early Hollywood film. It concludes by discussing how some sexual minorities responded to classical Hollywood’s representations of sexuality, and considers a few of the alternative images produced within the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s.

(Hetero)Sexuality on Screen

Heterosexuality has been present in American film since its inception. One of the first films made at Thomas Edison ’s studio featured an actor and actress kissing and, as was discussed in chapter 2, by the 1920s almost every Hollywood film contained a romantic plot or subplot. Regardless of the genre or the specific goals of the protagonist, classical Hollywood cinema almost always includes the struggle to unite a male–female couple. In these films, not only is heterosexuality considered better than other sexual orientations , it is presented as the only sexual orientation. Such an assumption – that heterosexuality is the only (or only normal) sexual orientation– is a powerful aspect of Hollywood’s heterosexism . Audiences watching these films experienced worlds wherein sexual identity was never questioned – everyone was straight, and heterosexual desire was understood as “natural” because there were no other choices.

Even as Hollywood films have more recently begun to acknowledge that the American population encompasses a variety of sexual identities, heterosexuality remains the privileged position, the center around which all others revolve, the norm against which all others are compared. For example, while heterosexual behavior is considered ordinary and unexceptional in mainstream cinema, the few non-straight people that do appear in Hollywood films tend to be conspicuously different. Straight characters are defined by their profession, their income bracket, or a variety of aspects other than their sexuality, but non-straight characters are usually defined primarily (if not solely) by their sexuality. (As we shall see, this trend often presents non-heterosexual figures as odd and eccentric, or even scary, threatening, and evil.) Furthermore, under heterosexist presumptions, only films that have homosexual characters in them are considered to be about issues of sexuality, much as people often think that a film is about race or ethnicity only when a racial or ethnic minority appears in it. The point to recognize is that Hollywood films always construct images of heterosexuality, just as they also (if more rarely) construct images of homosexuality. Thus, American film works ideologically to shape the way that both individuals and the nation as a whole make sense of sexuality in general.

Another issue that arises in studying the cinematic representations of sexuality (hetero or otherwise) is that sexual orientation does not always manifest itself as a highly visible social marker. There are few definitive indications that code a person as either straight or gay. For example, in Thomas Edison’s early short film The Gay Brothers (1895), two men dance to the music of a gramophone: are we to understand that they are meant to be homosexual? They might simply be two heterosexual workers in Edison’s factory performing for the newly invented camera, although the word “gay” in the title seems to imply that they are meant to be encoded as homosexual. (However, “gay” was only then evolving its contemporary meaning; throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, most heterosexual people only understood the word to mean “happy.”) As this example illustrates, in order to construct “visible” sexuality, characters must “perform” sexuality: they must be physically intimate with each other or indicate their desire to be so. As in real life, heterosexuals in the movies commonly make public displays of affection or desire, as when a man comments on a woman’s beauty, or when a woman places a picture of her husband on her desk at work. Even more regularly, visual media texts employ patriarchal codes of gender – including hair, makeup, costume, and performance – to signal their characters’ sexualities. “Real men” – that is to say, heterosexual men – are tough, bold, and assertive, and wear short hair and pants. “Real” or heterosexual women are expected to be meek, quiet, and subservient, and to wear long hair and skirts. Conversely, images of effeminate men or mannish women became the main method of representing homosexuality in early American cinema (and in some cases these conventions continue to this day).

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sexual relations between men and women were considered a delicate and frequently unspoken-of subject. Social historians point out that many of the earliest settlers of the English colonies were Protestant Puritans, who held very strict codes of behavior and considered any sex outside of procreative marital intercourse to be sinful. Interestingly, when the term “heterosexuality” was first coined by nineteenth-century medical researchers, it was used to describe a condition of disease (as was homosexuality). A heterosexual was someone who had sexual relations with someone of the opposite sex outside the bonds of marriage . During that era, monogamous, religiously sanctioned, and solely procreative sex between men and women was considered the only “normal” sexuality by both religious and medical figures. As we have seen in earlier chapters of this book, wanton and reckless heterosexuality was regularly used to demonize racial/ethnic minorities and members of the lower classes. More regularly, classical Hollywood narratives focus on the protagonist (either male or female) deciding between alternative types of heterosexual behavior (sex within or outside of marriage? with this partner or that one?) – with the advertising (posters, trailers) often enticing audiences with the possibilities. While indicating that there are multiple ways to be heterosexual, eventually one type of heterosexuality is indicated as “better”: monogamous procreative marriage. Yet different ideas of what is considered “proper” heterosexuality have developed over the past century. Today, for example, sex outside of marriage and non-procreative sex have become common behaviors among heterosexuals, both in film and in real life.

Yet those changes in the cultural meanings of heterosexuality have not been without opponents. Throughout the twentieth century, various groups sought to control and censor sex and sexualized images (as still happens today in many places). Even Edison’s film of a brief heterosexual kiss, mentioned above, was considered shocking, and people of that era called for its censorship. Hollywood has often been swept into these battles over censorship, as various films (as well as film stars) have caused scandals for violating what certain groups considered to be appropriate heterosexual behavior. (For example, when actress Ingrid Bergman left her husband in the late 1940s and had a child by another man, she was demonized in the press and didn’t work in Hollywood for several years.) In truth, Hollywood finds itself in a paradox when it comes to sexuality. In trying to attract audiences, Hollywood films regularly include some sort of sexual titillation, but at the same time, they must appease moralists who object to such displays. Throughout Hollywood’s classical period, consumer groups, the Production Code , and state and federal obscenity laws sought to police and regulate onscreen heterosexuality. In most cases, those same forces attempted to eradicate onscreen homosexuality altogether.

(Homo)Sexuality in Early Film

Just as images and concepts of heterosexuality have evolved over the past century, so have images and concepts of homosexuality. However, while heterosexual imagery was pervasively present, homosexuality was rarely acknowledged in early American cinema. Filmmakers shied away from obvious homosexual characters, and almost never depicted homosexual embraces or kisses. Instead, early Hollywood films used visual gender codes to construct male homosexuals as effeminate (and thus “failed”) men, a stereotype that became known as the pansy character. Several early comic Westerns exploited this practice. Algie, the Miner (1912) and The Soilers (1923) include less-than-manly fellows prancing around (and in contrast with) more conventional he-men. Wanderer of the West (1927) introduces a shop clerk with the title card, “One of Nature’s mistakes, in a land where men were men.” Effeminacy in men was considered so innately odd and humorous that many silent film comedians, such as Fatty Arbuckle, Wallace Beery, and Charlie Chaplin, repeatedly cross-dressed in their films for comic effect. Even without sound dialog to explain it, films like these communicated to mainstream American society an image of what homosexuals supposedly looked and acted like: they were men that acted like women.

While pansy figures were the dominant image of homosexuality on silent American movie screens, a vibrant early example of this gender inversion model being applied to women can be found in A Florida Enchantment (1914). In this film, a woman and her African American maid (a white actress in blackface ) swallow seeds that alter their sexual identity. Suddenly, the women are demonstrably attracted to other women, breaking off with their boyfriends in order to seduce young maidens. Conceiving that the seeds must have turned them into men, they abandon their bustles and petticoats for suits and ties. Toward the end of the film, one of the boyfriends also swallows a seed – resulting in his flirting with another man, and then donning a dress (considering himself transformed into a woman). Played for comedy, the characters (and by implication those involved in encoding and decoding the film) firmly linked same-sex attraction to the idea of gender inversion.

With such a heavy emphasis on homosexuals as people who deviated from traditional gender roles, individuals who did maintain traditional gender expectations were allowed a wide range of physical contact with others of the same sex during this period. For example, in many silent films the male characters hug and even kiss each other with fondness and sincerity. When two men embrace in Flesh and the Devil (1926), or when one man weeps and kisses his dying comrade in Wings (1927), most audiences at the time probably did not decode these characters as gay (the way that contemporary spectators might). Rather they were understood as heterosexual buddies – homosocial comrades and not homosexual lovers. Such demonstrations were allowed and considered heterosexual both in film and in culture because the men involved exhibited typically masculine (or in the case of two women, typically feminine ) traits. The men in Flesh and the Devil are military officers, and the best friends in Wings are World War I pilots. No one minces, sashays, or bats their eyelashes in an effeminate way. As long as such characters upheld traditional patriarchal gender roles, most audiences probably never even countenanced the possibility of homosexual relations between them.

Early European cinema, unlike American, often had a more sophisticated take on human sexuality. When and if these films played American theaters, though, they were often so badly censored or re-edited that they lost most of their homosexual meaning. The same thing happened to the American silent film Salome (1923), produced by the famous lesbian actress Alla Nazimova. Based upon the play by Oscar Wilde (the famous English poet and playwright who had been imprisoned less than three decades earlier because of his homosexuality), the film featured an allegedly all-homosexual cast. It was heavily censored across the United States and for years existed as mere fragments of a feature. While Hollywood filmmakers and American audiences were happy to exploit the comedic stereotype of the pansy, they were reluctant to explore other, more complex aspects of homosexual art or homosexual lives.

By the 1920s, the American film industry was growing at an amazing pace, and its dizzying success created a slightly more open atmosphere for people to experiment with all sorts of untraditional behaviors. In Hollywood, a number of people felt freer to experiment sexually and/or express their same-sex desires more openly. A number of leading male actors, including Ramon Novarro and William Haines , led relatively open gay or bisexual lives. Rumors surrounded certain actresses as well, such as Janet Gaynor and Greta Garbo. Large numbers of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people also worked behind the cameras. In fact, it is often noted or claimed that the entertainment industries attract a disproportionately large number of homosexuals. One of the cultural reasons supporting this idea has been that theater, dance, and the related arts are considered by many to be less-than-masculine professions. Thus, the gender inversion model of homosexuality would lead people to think that any man who wanted to be an actor, a set designer, or a costume designer would have to be homosexual. Also, so the argument goes, most homosexuals of earlier decades had to remain in the closet and “play straight” in order to survive in heterosexual society – and because of this they became used to acting and inventing creative stories. Ultimately, the pervasive attitude that there are lots of gay people in show business may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as homosexuals may enter the industry in the hope of finding others like themselves.

Related to this concept has been a historically consistent worry by some people that homosexuals in the entertainment industry have used their power to undermine the primacy of heterosexuality. Such worries of a “Pink Mafia” seem unfounded when looking at the history of Hollywood. While many lesbian and gay people were working in Hollywood in the 1920s, films that represent non-straight individuals in anything but a degrading comic light are extremely rare. Although some homosexual filmmakers lived slightly more open lives in the seclusion of the Hollywood hills, the majority of them still kept their sexuality a secret. Furthermore, filmmakers knew that in order to find success at the box office they had to make pictures that reaffirmed heterosexuality. The actor William Haines may not have hid from his friends and co-workers the fact that he was in a long-term relationship with another man, but onscreen he always played a heterosexual guy chasing a girl.

Actor William Haines was a top box office star in the late 1920s and early 1930s; when he refused to keep his homosexuality in the closet, he was fired from his studio contract at MGM. Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection

Censoring Sexuality during the Classical Hollywood Era

The heady success of the Hollywood film studios during the 1920s had its effect on heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. Tales of torrid love affairs, quick Mexican divorces, and wild orgies filled the pages of movie fan magazines, presenting a hedonistic vision of Hollywood heterosexuality. Much of this held an appeal for American audiences in the 1920s, particularly the younger generation who were forsaking their parents’ Victorian attitudes in favor of a new “Jazz Age” morality. Hollywood films also capitalized on this shift in values. A number of risqué sex comedies, made by directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim, were released during these years. These films, such as Old Wives for New (1918) and Blind Husbands (1919), usually ended with a reassertion of traditional values: straying spouses saw the error of their ways, seducers were punished, and good, old-fashioned, patriarchal heterosexual monogamy triumphed – but only after the film had already titillated audiences with various sorts of sexual transgression.

Hollywood’s reputation for sexual excess began to catch up with it during the 1920s, however, as a number of sex scandals rocked the industry. The most notorious of these involved star comedian Fatty Arbuckle, who was tried for manslaughter over the death of a young woman that occurred during an all-weekend party in 1921. Newspapers insinuated that the heavy-set comedian had accidentally killed the woman while forcing his sexual attentions on her. While Arbuckle was eventually cleared of all charges, the media stories effectively destroyed his career. This and other scandals also resulted in industry worries that the federal government might step in to regulate and censor American films. To keep that from happening, the studios came together to establish their own censorship board, headed by former postmaster general Will Hays .

When the Hays Office adopted the Hollywood Production Code in 1930, it forbade the depiction of any forms of explicit heterosexual display, as well as any implication of what it called “sex perversion,” that is, homosexuality. (This in itself tells us something about how homosexuality was thought of at the time – as an abnormal medical condition that was inappropriate for representation in popular culture.) However, as we have seen, until the Code was enforced in 1934 – via the Seal of Approval provision – Hollywood films actually became more violent and sexual, in order to woo customers back into theaters during the darkest years of the Great Depression (see chapter 10). Husbands and wives were shown having affairs, and unmarried characters seemed to be having as much sex as were married ones. Biblical epics, such as DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), continued to entice audiences with scenes of Roman orgies, even as the films themselves allegedly denounced such excesses.

Under such circumstances, images of homosexuals in Hollywood films were not too difficult to find. The pansy craze , a pop cultural phenomenon of the 1920s and early 1930s, had erupted in countless movies, plays, and nightclub acts of the era. Just as straight white New Yorkers traveled uptown to visit black nightclubs in Harlem, so they would also travel downtown to partake of the urban gay culture’s drag shows and gay bars. Moviegoers were ushered into a pansy nightclub for a musical number in Call Me Savage (1932) and they discovered two men dancing together in Wonder Bar (1934). Lesbian chic was also a facet of the period. In Morocco (1930), a tuxedo-wearing Marlene Dietrich vamped both men and women.

In 1934, with the debut of the Seal of Approval provision, the Production Code Administration became a much more severe censor. The Administration pored over scripts and sent stacks of memos to studios, pointing out any character, situation, costume, or line of dialog that seemed to indicate anything less than strict heterosexual, monogamous propriety. (As discussed in chapter 10, this propriety also included strictures against sexual independence for women.) Married straight couples in Hollywood movies were expected to sleep in separate beds. Kissing had to be done with closed, dry mouths and last for only a few seconds. If it took place on a sofa or bed, the Code authorities mandated that at least one person’s foot must be touching the ground! Of course, the enforcement of the Production Code did not mean that sex completely disappeared from Hollywood movies. Rather, it now had to be suggested obliquely and implied in more subtle ways. For example, when a romantic couple fell into each other’s arms in front of a burning fireplace, the scene might fade to black and cut to the lovers the following morning, now wearing different clothes and smoking cigarettes. American film audiences soon learned to fill in the gaps. Other visual devices, such as dissolving from an embrace to waves crashing on the shore, or fireworks going off, or a train entering a tunnel, even more clearly suggested what the filmmakers could not depict forthrightly.

While representations of heterosexual desire had to be muted, and actual sex acts somewhat coded, heterosexual romance remained a building block of classical Hollywood narrative form . On the other hand, explicit representations of homosexuality were banned after 1934. Yet, just as various filmmakers discovered coded ways to suggest heterosexual coupling, homosexuality (or perhaps more accurately queer moments) also managed to find subtle ways onto the screen. The post-Code film Sylvia Scarlett (1935) is a good case in point. Much like one of Shakespeare’s comedies in which men impersonate women and vice versa, Sylvia Scarlett created and exploited for laughs all sorts of queer situations based upon mistaken gender roles. In the film, both men and women find themselves attracted to what they think is a man, played by Katharine Hepburn. But because the film never explicitly acknowledged homosexuality itself, it managed to get past the Hollywood censors.

Connotative homosexuality became the usual way that classical Hollywood cinema represented gay and lesbian characters for the next thirty years. Connotation means implying or suggesting something rather than stating it outright. Thus, subtle signs that suggested gender inversion were added to characters in order to imply that they were not heterosexual. The fastidious apartment manager with his tiny mustache and clipped speech was understood by sophisticated audiences to be homosexual, just as the mannish prison matron was understood to be lesbian. Musicals and comedies still regularly featured the pansy stereotype , often as a supporting character in roles such as dress designers and choreographers (again connecting show business with homosexuality). Although the Production Code had forbidden filmmakers to denotate (or explicitly state) that these characters were homosexual, through subtle formal codes and stereotypical markers, audiences nevertheless understood them to be so.

Queer gender-bending touches were also used in Hollywood films to demarcate people who were villainous or criminal. Alfred Hitchcock was one of hundreds of directors whose films regularly employed this connotative strategy. For example, a Nazi spy in Saboteur (1942) speaks of having long blond hair just like a girl when he was a child: this deviance from traditional gender roles suggests a linkage between his connotated homosexuality and Nazism. Hitchcock’s male killers in Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951) display a multitude of stereotypically effeminate traits, and both of those films subtly work to conflate deviance from traditional norms of gender and sexuality with murderous and psychotic criminality.

Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is perhaps the best example of all: psycho-killer Norman Bates is a slightly effeminate young man who dresses in women’s clothes and murders naked women. Is Norman meant to be a homosexual? A heterosexual transvestite ? A transsexual ? One ideological message of these films, and the thousands like them, is that people who exhibit traditional patriarchal gender identities are heterosexual heroes and heroines, whereas queer men and women are likely to be villainous or crazy.

This type of connotative coding flourished within most Hollywood genres, but especially within the horror film . In consistently telling tales about monstrous threats to “normality,” most classical Hollywood horror films posit white heterosexual couples and institutions as normal, and everything else (non-white, non-straight, non-male-dominant) as frightening. Dracula (1931) and his vampiric cohorts, for example, are perhaps the most overtly sexualized of movie monsters: their attacks on both men and women are frequently represented as a form of seduction or rape. There is even an entire subgenre of the horror film known as the lesbian vampire film , and until the rise of gay and lesbian independent filmmaking in the mid-1980s, the image of the lesbian vampire was arguably the most common representation of lesbians on American movie screens. Mad scientists like Frankenstein (1931) and their closely bonded male assistants are always trying to create life without the benefit of heterosexual union, a queer subtext that the later cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) satirically exploded. In it, Dr Frank N. Furter, a “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania,” constructs and brings to life a blond muscle-man for his own sexual pleasure. Overall, throughout its history the horror film has linked homosexuality with bestiality, necrophilia, devil-worship, murder, sadomasochism, and incest. Even today, some people who are prejudiced against homosexuality can only see it as a monstrous act linked with bestiality and Satanism, and not as a type of loving human relationship.

The director of Frankenstein , and several other classical Hollywood horror movies, was the openly gay James Whale . For an attuned spectator, it is easy to see Whale’s homosexual sensibility at work in his films, most spectacularly in The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). For both films Whale cast his old friend, female impersonator Ernest Thesiger, as a decidedly odd fellow who (in the latter film) steals Henry Frankenstein away from his bridal chamber so that the two men may continue their secret experiments in the queer creation of life. Whale was something of a rarity in Hollywood of the 1930s – an openly gay man who refused to “play straight” for his peers or for the public. (The Oscar-winning independent film Gods and Monsters [1998] is based on his life.) In the 1930s, most gay and lesbian people in America were forced to lead double lives, keeping their sexuality a secret. With no organized homosexual rights movement, they could be (and were) regularly fired from jobs, thrown out of social groups and leases, arrested and harassed, beaten and murdered.

In Hollywood itself, the relative sexual freedoms of the 1920s evaporated after the Code was enforced in 1934. Increasingly, “morals clauses” were inserted into employee contracts, allowing the studios to immediately dismiss workers for any behavior deemed unsavory, whether heterosexual or homosexual. Faced with the possibility of being fired, many homosexual actors and actresses chose to hide their sexuality, aided by powerful studio publicity departments that arranged heterosexual dates or even fake weddings, known as marriages of convenience . Some of the famous actors and actresses from Hollywood’s classical period who have been alleged to be either homosexual or bisexual include Charles Laughton, Danny Kaye, Cary Grant, Marjorie Main, Judith Anderson, Laurence Olivier, Agnes Moorehead, Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, Cesar Romero, and Barbara Stanwyck. Many of these individuals went to their graves without confirming or denying their sexuality.

Director James Whale, who infused a gay sensibility into many classical Hollywood horror films, is seen here on the set of Showboat (1936) with star Paul Robeson. Showboat , copyright © 1936, Universal

Directors, designers, musicians, and producers, because they were not in the spotlight as much as actors, usually did not take such drastic steps as arranged heterosexual marriages in order to remain employable. One of the most successful directors of the classical Hollywood era was George Cukor , a man most of Hollywood knew to be gay, but who was discreet about it. Perhaps because of his homosexuality, Cukor was pegged by the industry as a “woman’s director,” and he was allegedly fired from Gone With the Wind (1939) because leading man Clark Gable did not want to work with a homosexual director. In more recent years it has been suggested that Cukor knew of Gable’s past homosexual experiences and that is why Gable had him fired. Nonetheless, George Cukor directed many classic American films during a career that spanned six decades, including Camille (1936), The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Pat and Mike (1952), A Star is Born (1954), My Fair Lady (1964), and Rich and Famous (1981). Another homosexual filmmaker who worked within the Hollywood system during the classical period was Dorothy Arzner (discussed at greater length in chapter 10). Arzner too was discreet about her sexuality. The pictures she directed were mostly melodramas and woman’s films , a few of which have been reclaimed as important by both feminist and queer film theorists. Thus, while it was possible to be queer and have a career in Hollywood during the 1930s, one’s life and livelihood were hampered to greater or lesser degrees by the constraints of the closet.

Gay Hollywood director George Cukor was discreet about his sexuality; he is seen here with Katharine Hepburn on the set of The Philadelphia Story (1940). The Philadelphia Story , copyright © 1940, MGM

Postwar Sexualities and the Weakening of the Production Code

During World War II, many Americans became more familiar with concepts related to human sexuality. During the 1930s, a few books on sex education were tentatively published for the public (before that, they could only be sold to medical professionals), but by the 1940s sex was a topic that was being increasingly discussed in various venues. The tense and dangerous atmosphere of the war years meant that sex, or the lack of it, was often on people’s minds. Some women considered it their patriotic duty to have sex with young soldiers who were shipping out and might never return. Similarly, “cheesecake” photos of female starlets were distributed to soldiers to remind them what they were fighting for, and soldiers were also shown frank instructional films about sexually transmitted diseases. Although homosexuality was certainly not encouraged by the government, under the conditions of war the American populace was predominantly segregated by gender, and strong emotional bonds were often formed between women working on the swing shift or between men at the front. Many gay and lesbian people met others like themselves for the first time during World War II. Realizing they were not alone, they began to form groups and subcultures, even within the armed services. (The history of homosexuality during World War II has been explored in the book and documentary film Coming Out Under Fire [1994].)

During the 1940s, psychiatric and psychoanalytic concepts were also being absorbed into mainstream culture. This meant that people now had a “scientific” vocabulary with which to discuss sex and sexuality. About halfway through the war, the armed services began using psychiatrists to identify and weed out homosexuals from the military, because it was felt that homosexual men were effeminate and would weaken the fighting caliber of their units. (A traditionally masculine man who engaged in same-sex relations was less likely to be considered a “true” homosexual and more likely to be retained.) The military’s infamous “Blue Discharge” for homosexual men and women was based upon understanding homosexuality as a mental illness. Many of these dishonorable discharges chose to remain in the cities where they disembarked, rather than return to their small-town homes to face a potentially hostile reception from friends and family. It was chiefly in those cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City) that gay and lesbian people began to congregate and set up new lives.

Homosexual rights groups such as the Mattachine Society (based in Los Angeles) and the Daughters of Bilitis (based in the San Francisco Bay area) began to organize in the postwar years; their members usually met in secret and used aliases, fearing for their safety and livelihood should they be discovered. The US government repeatedly tried to prosecute many of these groups’ journals under obscenity laws, despite the fact they were social and political and not erotic in content. Reviewing these early journals from a current perspective, one can see that many of the people writing and reading them thought of themselves as mentally ill. They had so internalized the dominant medical construction of homosexuality that they used it as a basis for suggesting civil rights protections. Homosexuals should not be persecuted, so the argument went, but rather cured or helped to adjust to heterosexist society.

The rise of slightly more visible homosexual communities and changing scientific ideas regarding homosexuality precipitated a shift in the homosexual’s social status in the postwar period. Most famously, Dr Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , published in 1948, revealed a much higher incidence of homosexual behavior among white American males than anyone had ever suspected. According to Kinsey’s report, 37 percent of men surveyed had had homosexual sex. (Current statistics suggest that about 5 percent of the population self-identifies as not straight.) Kinsey also suggested that human sexuality was a fluid concept based upon social conditions and that the binary opposition homosexual–heterosexual should be replaced with a sliding scale that acknowledged that fact. Tied to this, the report helped usher in a new image of the homosexual not based on gender inversion. While the pansy stereotype did not completely disappear, American society now acknowledged that there had to be “straight-acting” homosexuals, as clearly 37 percent of American men were not pansies. Such statistics also forced a reconception of heterosexuality – now being straight meant not only “gender normal” but also not showing physical affection to members of the same sex. Heterosexual men began to fear being labeled homosexual for hugging another male friend (or sitting next to him in a movie theater). Since the 1950s, Hollywood films that depict homosocial male bonding have abandoned the embraces and kisses of silent films in favor of playful violence and (often homophobic) putdowns.

These new conceptions precipitated mass paranoia about homosexuality during the 1950s. Homosexuals were now thought to be secretly passing as straight in order to infiltrate and corrupt America. In fact, homosexuals were considered second only to communist sympathizers as the largest threat to national security during the first years of the Cold War . Homosexual workers were witch-hunted out of government jobs, and thousands more would be banned not only from the military, but even from private-sector jobs. (As of 2008, there is still no federal law completely prohibiting such discriminatory actions.) The linking of homosexuality to communism worked to drive homosexuals in the film industry further into the closet. For example, the rising career of Rock Hudson was insured by a constant studio-run effort to erase evidence of his homosexuality from the public eye. Hudson played brawny and masculine romantic leads, and he also married his female press agent in order to stamp out any potential rumors about his sexual orientation. On the other hand, when actor Tommy Kirk was discovered with another young man, he was quickly and quietly dropped from his contract at the Walt Disney studio.

Recall that while the dominant Red Scare culture of 1950s America was stressing conformity (see chapter 2), Hollywood found itself in economic difficulties because of the Paramount Consent Decrees and competition from television. Foreign films and American-made independent exploitation films were also cutting into Hollywood’s profits. These films promised (but rarely delivered) more sex and sexuality than could be found in the usual Hollywood fare, and so they often made a great deal of money. For example, the French import And God Created Woman (1957) was a huge hit, primarily because it focused on the uninhibited sexuality of a blonde bombshell played by Brigitte Bardot. Enterprising independent filmmakers transferred theatrical striptease and burlesque acts to film, and programs of these short films also attracted heterosexual male spectators eager to see women displayed as erotic objects. Hollywood filmmakers quickly realized there was an audience for more “adult” subjects, and they too began to make sex comedies and steamy melodramas, often adapted from Broadway plays by writers like William Inge and Tennessee Williams . Many of these movies dramatized dysfunctional heterosexual relationships and dealt with issues such as lust, desire, impotency, rape, and sexual repression (albeit in still heavily coded ways).

These new adult Hollywood films encountered repeated problems with the Production Code Administration. In one famous example, the Code Administration wanted to censor the word “virgin” from the screenplay of The Moon is Blue (1953), but its director refused, and he released the film without the Code’s Seal of Approval. When the film became a big box office hit even without the Seal, it proved to Hollywood that the Code was perhaps outmoded, and that sex was a topic that sold tickets. Many more films of the 1950s (both foreign and American) that dealt frankly with heterosexual relations contributed to the ongoing revision and weakening of the Production Code. Homosexuality, however, was still a taboo subject in Hollywood movies, and homosexual plot points in the film versions of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) were either removed or (as usual) obliquely connotated. Perhaps most remarkably, Hollywood adapted and released a version of Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), in which Elizabeth Taylor plays a character who has been used by her homosexual cousin Sebastian to lure men into his circle of influence. The homosexual cousin never appears fully on screen, and in the end, he is ripped apart and devoured by a mob of men and boys upon whom he has preyed. Lurid and gothic, and full of the era’s negative connotations of homosexuality (that is, that homosexuality is predatory, pedophilic, decadent, and monstrous), the film was a box office hit even as it was condemned by moral watchdog groups such as the Catholic Legion of Decency .

Tea and Sympathy (1956) was another film adapted from a Broadway play that challenged the Production Code with implied homosexuality. Eventually, Hollywood filmed a watered-down version of the play that shifted the issue from sexuality to gender. For example, while Sherwood Anderson’s play points out that its young male protagonist Tom is taunted by his classmates for being homosexual, in the film version the classmates taunt him for simply being “unmanly.” Interestingly, while Tom is singled out because of his “feminine” traits, the gruff housemaster seems to be vaguely uncertain about his own sexual orientation. Conventionally masculine (as shown in scenes of his boisterous homosocial roughhousing with his male charges), the housemaster is shown to have intimacy problems with his wife, who wonders aloud why her husband is so overtly antagonistic to the young man. Thus, buried within innuendo and connotation, Tea and Sympathy suggests that the husband may be dealing with repressed homosexual feelings himself, and that those are what fuels his discomfort with Tom in the first place. Drawing upon the heterosexist myth that a good woman can “cure” a gay man with her sexual charms, the play ends with the wife offering herself to the boy in order to ease him into heterosexuality. While the play ends without stating whether this provocative offer succeeds or not, the film adds a final scene, years later, informing the audience that the boy is now married – that his conversion therapy has worked. (The woman, on the other hand, having had sex outside of her marriage, has come to a tragic end.) Obviously problematic in its use of stereotypes, and full of erroneous ideas about the nature of human sexuality, the film does raise many interesting issues related to gender and sexuality in 1950s America.

In 1961, the Production Code was amended to allow for the depiction and discussion of homosexuality, as long as it was done with “care, discretion, and restraint.” Hollywood’s first few films to deal with the topic, however, fell back onto previous formulas and melodramatic clichés. In The Children’s Hour (1962), based on a Lillian Hellman play from the 1930s, a school teacher hangs herself after her lesbianism is exposed. In Advise and Consent (1962), a promising young politician takes a razor to his throat when a past homosexual relationship threatens to come to light. The message in these films was clear: homosexuality was understood as a tragic flaw linked to violence, crime, shame, and, more often than not, suicide. At best, these films called for pity and sympathy for people who could not help suffering from the “illness” of homosexuality.

Not all homosexuals of the era considered themselves pitiful creatures, though, and as various other social groups began to organize and increasingly protest throughout the 1960s, many lesbians and gay men joined the struggle for civil rights. Gay and lesbian activists contributed to the vibrant American counterculture that opposed the status quo of racism, sexism, and the war in Vietnam. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the counterculture had little interest in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, as it tended to uphold the dominance of white patriarchal capitalism . For inspiration, entertainment, and political meaning, the counterculture turned instead to foreign films, independent American cinema, and even more radical avant-garde films . It was in those American avant-garde films of the 1960s that some homosexual spectators found not only overt representations of themselves, but also a critique of Hollywood’s representation of sexuality itself.

In Tea and Sympathy (1956), a young man (John Kerr) is harassed by his classmates for being effeminate; in this publicity shot he is comforted by a housemother (Deborah Kerr). Tea and Sympathy , copyright © 1956, MGM

Camp and the Underground Cinema

Despite their denotative absence from American movie screens during the era of classical Hollywood cinema, many gay and lesbian people loved the movies and attended regularly. Hollywood movies offer an often-beautiful lie to spectators, and a chance to avoid reality for at least a few hours. Thus, it should not be surprising that members of any socially disenfranchised group, however defined, would be drawn to Hollywood’s brand of escapism. Homosexuals were no exception, and during Hollywood’s classical era many urban gay men developed a highly stylized approach to decoding Hollywood film that became known as camp . Camp is thus a textual reading strategy tied (originally but no longer) to a specific subculture . Camp is both an appreciation of Hollywood style and artifice and at the same time a critique of it. Camp reception is always a “double reading” in which the form and content of Hollywood film are both passionately embraced and simultaneously mocked. It is political in that it draws attention to issues of gender and sexuality and in so doing opens up spaces in which those roles may be analyzed and/or deconstructed.

Camp is often associated with gay men’s idolization of certain Hollywood stars: Mae West, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Lana Turner, to name just a few. Camp is critical (often using disparaging humor as its weapon), but the idolization of these female stars by urban gay men suggests a genuine love and appreciation of them as well. Many of these female performers exuded a “biggerthan-life” quality both onscreen and off, a sense of always performing and never letting themselves be “real.” This phoniness is important to camp taste, as evidenced by the fact that many camp icons were “bad” actresses or minor stars (such as Maria Montez), valued by gay spectators precisely because of their limited acting ability. It has been theorized that gay men and lesbians were drawn to these stars precisely because they mirrored the “heterosexual role-playing” necessarily practiced by most closeted homosexuals. Camp appreciation of such “bad” acting extended to certain male stars as well, such as muscle-man Steve Reeves, whose lesser acting talents pointed out that masculinity was just as much a performance as femininity. Furthermore, many of these stars, such as Judy Garland, faced other hardships in their personal lives (drug abuse, failed relationships), but were perceived as fighters as they gamely struggled through life. Gay men were attracted to both the exaggerated and performative gender of these stars (which in their extremes seem to suggest almost a parody of masculinity and femininity) as well as their determination to survive by way of that same performativity.

Camp thus became a subcultural way of simultaneously appreciating and potentially deconstructing mainstream Hollywood texts. It also formed the basis for a number of short films made by homosexual filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol. These films were part of the movement of underground film , American avant-garde filmmaking practice localized in and around New York City and Los Angeles in the late 1950s and 1960s. In many cases, underground films were taboo-breaking and highly controversial. Many of the movement’s films, filmmakers, and exhibitors were repeatedly brought into court on obscenity charges. Underground film practice thus also helped to contribute to the demise of the Production Code, as court rulings slowly permitted more and more formerly taboo subjects to be depicted onscreen. These films were not pornographic, but they did contain some very raw and sexualized images and ideas for their era.

Many of the more famous underground films employ and engage with concepts of camp style and performance. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1962) features characters (slave girls, vampires, Roman guards, etc.) and overly dramatic music drawn from exotic Hollywood melodramas. The cast participates in what might be called an anti-orgy: listless blank faces and body parts are wiggled at the camera in a parody of the Hollywood bacchanalia. Andy Warhol’s early films also parodied Hollywood style and conventions: his actors (many of whom were drag queens) called themselves “superstars” and behaved as if they were Hollywood royalty. Warhol’s radical minimalist style (long static takes of singular actions, as in the films Eat [1963], Sleep [1963], or Couch [1964]) further distanced spectators and by implication critiqued the lush opulence of Hollywood film. Perhaps the most famous underground film is Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), a film that combines found footage, contemporary pop songs, and a host of other cultural artifacts to examine the homoerotic cult of the motorcyclist. Incorporating footage of actual bikers and an old Hollywood movie on the life of Christ, the film compares religious cultism to the worship of the biker, and suggests that hero worship can lead to fascism.

Underground films were a short-lived and highly specialized filmmaking practice, and they provided an important social function as community-gathering events. Shown often at or after midnight in urban nightclubs and community centers, they allowed members of fledgling gay communities to meet and organize. Their status as “art” helped to legitimate camp and other aspects of homosexual culture within some mainstream circles. For example, in “Notes on Camp,” published in 1964, cultural theorist Susan Sontag explored how camp as a form of urban, gay male reception practice was being assimilated into mainstream culture. She also distinguished between naïve camp , the camp of failed seriousness, and deliberate camp , the intentional construction of a film (or other cultural artifact) in such a way as to elicit a camp reaction. Naïve camp is thus a function of reception or decoding – finding something funny that was meant to be taken seriously. However, by the end of the 1960s, camp reading had become so prevalent and popular that Hollywood was itself releasing deliberately campy films such as Candy (1968), Barbarella (1968), and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). On television, shows such as Lost in Space (CBS, 1965–8) and Batman (ABC, 1966–8) were also produced as deliberate camp artifacts, and they briefly became pop culture sensations.

Case Study: The Celluloid Closet (1995)

Before it was a documentary film, The Celluloid Closet was a book by gay film critic Vito Russo (first published in 1981 and revised and updated in 1987). Both the book and the film survey the onscreen representation of homosexuality throughout the history of cinema. There had been a few other books about homosexuality in the movies (most notably Parker Tyler’s 1972 book Screening the Sexes ), but Russo’s The Celluloid Closet quickly became a seminal text in gay and lesbian media studies. In the 1990s, award-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman adapted the book into a feature-length documentary that was exhibited at independent art-house theaters, on pay TV, and via home video. In many ways, the decision to turn a book about the movies back into a film about the movies was an excellent one, because many of the characters and examples that Russo wrote about could now be collected and shown together within a single film text. Produced in conjunction with HBO Motion Pictures, the film is narrated by Lily Tomlin and features a variety of Hollywood stars, media scholars, writers, and directors introducing and commenting on film clips that illustrate the changing representations of homosexuality on American movie screens.

Like the book, the film The Celluloid Closet takes a roughly historical approach to its topic. It shows examples of how early Hollywood used gender inversion as a marker of homosexuality, and how it used the “pansy” stereotype as the butt of jokes. The film then explores how the Hollywood Production Code attempted to outlaw the representation of homosexuality, but also how clever filmmakers could work around that proscription via connotation and implication. For example, a clip from The Maltese Falcon (1941), explained by media scholar Richard Dyer, illustrates in simple terms how costume, hair design, and music were manipulated by the filmmakers to encode a certain character as a homosexual. Audaciously, the filmmakers even had this character fondle a cane and bring it to his lips in a subtle phallic joke – one that was missed altogether by the Hollywood censors. The film also explores facets of spectatorship common to gay and lesbian audiences, and how in more recent years the figure of the homosexual moved from mere buffoon to outright threat. Hollywood stars such as Shirley MacLaine, Tom Hanks, and Susan Sarandon comment upon the gay and lesbian characters they have played, and screenwriters such as Barry Sandler (Making Love [1982]) and Gore Vidal (Suddenly Last Summer and Ben-Hur [1959]) talk about their experiences in confronting Hollywood heterosexism. Vidal’s onscreen assertion that he put a homoerotic subtext into Ben-Hur actually sparked a flurry of protest in the pages of the Los Angeles Times when Charlton Heston, the actor who played Ben-Hur, wrote in to denounce Vidal’s statements.

The Celluloid Closet is an expansive documentary made up of “talking-head” interviews and a wide variety of film clips that most Hollywood studios were convinced to let the filmmakers excerpt without paying royalties. It is an entire history of homosexuality in American film from its inception to the early 1990s, all told within a running time of 102 minutes. However, that necessary condensation sometimes forces the film to gloss over more finely way to go before homosexuals are allowed equal time nuanced arguments or theoretical concepts. The film and equal treatment on Hollywood screens (as the next also attempts to provide a happy ending by suggesting chapter will show). Nonetheless, the film remains an Hollywood’s representations of gay and lesbian people are excellent introduction to the history of homosexuality now somehow “accurate,” when indeed there is still a long in American film.

Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo (left) in The Maltese Falcon (1941). His hair, costume, hat and gloves, and cane suggest obliquely that he is homosexual – as do the expressions on the other characters’ faces. The Maltese Falcon , copyright © 1941, Warner Bros.

Yet, as with any subcultural artifact or practice that it is drawn back within the hegemonic mainstream, certain aspects of camp’s specific political charge became watered down or neutralized. Artifacts of pop camp , such as the Batman television show, rarely question the dynamics of gender and sexuality (unless you start to speculate about Batman and Robin themselves). Artifacts of queer camp , however, always seek to call into question the hierarchical constructions of gender and sexuality. The early work of independent gay director John Waters (including Multiple Maniacs [1970], Pink Flamingos [1972], and Female Trouble [1975]) are good examples of deliberate queer camp. These films star the transvestite actor Divine and consciously set out to satirize Hollywood conventions and middle-class mores. Even Hollywood produced a few deliberate queer camp texts during this era (such as Myra Breckinridge [1970] and The Rocky Horror Picture Show ), but the trend was very short-lived. Even so, many of these films have since developed cult followings, and they are frequently revived in midnight shows reminiscent of the original underground film screenings.

Questions for Discussion

1 How do you “know” what you know about human sexuality? Sexuality is a topic that is often exploited to sell movie tickets and other consumer goods, but how much open discussion of it is actually permitted in our culture? In what ways is sexuality still considered a taboo topic?

2 Stereotypes linger throughout the decades. Can you identify examples of the “pansy” stereotype or the “mannish woman” stereotype in today’s popular culture? Do homosexuals still meet “tragic” fates in film and television narratives?

3 What films seem campy to you, and why? What different types of camp do those films embody – naïve, deliberate, pop, or queer? Do these different types of camp overlap in some instances? How and why?