We can be uncharitable to the past. It makes us feel appropriately enlightened to assume a certain naïveté about how people used to live—how they dressed, how they ate, how they thought. Thus we tend to paint history with broad brushstrokes.
Films can tell an especially false tale. The American movies we watch from the era often referred to as the golden age of Hollywood (some call them “classics”), spanning the 1930s to the early 1960s, speak to us from sharply circumscribed boundaries.
The worlds they created—of propriety, of innuendo, of sly politesse—did not arise naturally from some kind of widespread cultural denial. Rather, Hollywood was under the thrall of something called the Motion Picture Production Code, an actual document of dictates and no-nos established to curtail violence and sexual licentiousness on-screen, written up by a committee of concerned Catholic laymen and formally ratified by former U.S. postmaster general Will Hays’s Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in 1930.
It wasn’t until Catholic hard-liner Joseph Ignatius Breen was hired as the head of the new Production Code Administration, in 1934, that these rules were strictly enforced, withholding stamps of approval for theatrical distribution, opening studios to lawsuits, and resulting in decades of films censored as early as the script stage.
Among the many rules was: “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.” This meant, very clearly, homosexuality. And not merely sexual images but any characters who could be read or construed as homosexual, bisexual, or in any way gender-nonconforming. We simply didn’t exist.
Some of the great pleasures of researching and writing my new book, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, have been the countless reminders of just how much we were there, and how our perspectives and sensibilities informed so many of the films we still love today. Perhaps it goes without saying that despite our physical eradication from movie screens, queer people existed, have always existed, and will exist as long as there’s a planet to live on, and any efforts to silence our identities or stanch our desire will only make us more present.
Our disappearance from the movies might make one forget the obvious: that queer people were both making and watching these movies. Queer directors such as George Cukor and Dorothy Arzner, screenwriters like Arthur Laurents and DeWitt Bodeen, stars like Montgomery Clift and Marlene Dietrich and Farley Granger, and innumerable below-the-line craftspeople made the movies what they were, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual audiences bought tickets and absorbed the queer messages and undercurrents that so many filmmakers surreptitiously smuggled into their works.
Among the most moving discoveries for me came from my research in the Lillian Hellman archives, at the Harry Ransom Center, in Austin. Hellman wrote The Children’s Hour, the hit Broadway play about two schoolteachers accused of lesbianism that became two Hollywood films, both directed by William Wyler and each bracketing the period of time the play covers.
For the 1936 version, retitled These Three, Hellman, writing her own screenplay, was forced to change the entire plot into a strictly heterosexual scandal. A handwritten 1935 letter from “Emma,” kept among Hellman’s materials, is a touching reminder of the persistence of gay audiences decades before we fought to be heard in any concerted political way. “Writing this … in the public library on an impulse. I hope you receive it safely,” the letter begins. “I have contacted a group of young people who are fine, worthy, and deserve to be helped in their young effort to live their own lives. You know the struggle one has in trying to submit mans. [manuscripts] to an editor on this theme of homosexuality. So, this group and myself have decided to publish a magazine of our own.”
I wonder if the magazine ever happened, even as an underground publication. Who knows whether Hellman took the letter seriously. But she kept it among her possessions, which is telling. And because she did, we’ll always know that Emma—like the rest of us—was here.
Michael Koresky is the senior curator of film at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image
