Hollywood Pride by Alonso Duralde
One of the earliest surviving motion pictures (1894-95) depicts two men dancing while a third man plays fiddle into the great horn of a primitive recording device. The film documented Thomas Edison’s first experiments in combining sound and vision; the music was preserved on a wax cylinder and the dancing men on flickering celluloid.
Looked at today, it might appear that gay men were present at the birth of film. Maybe, but those images might be a red herring, as Alonso Duralde admits in Hollywood Pride. “The dancers’ identities are lost to history, and there’s no indication they were romantically involved,” he writes. Likely, the two Edison employees were told to dance for the camera (women probably didn’t work in the Edison lab) to demonstrate motion in a confined space. And yet, that short film has become a powerful image for historians trying to sift out the hidden queer presence in early cinema.
Hollywood Pride builds from the work of pathfinding historians in the field. Lavishly illustrated with movie stills and production photos, Hollywood Pride opens with the closely closeted early 20th century and concludes in the openness of now. Before the 1990s, identifying LGBTQ actors, directors, screenwriters and crew is often a matter of reading between the lines and Duralde takes care not to read into the record. “Lifelong bachelorhood does not automatically imply an LGBTQ+ identity, and marriage and children do not automatically preclude one,” he writes. And the scope of some of actors included in Hollywood Pride, Marlene Dietrich among them, was too vast to be comfortable within any category.
Literature was more open to gay themes than movies during the years when the industry labored under a strict Production Code and censorship by state and local governments. As Duralde points out in the “Queer on Page, Straight on Screen” section, the bisexuality of The Lost Weekend’s protagonist was excised from the 1945 film. In the novel that became Crossfire (1947), the murder victim was killed for being gay. The screenplay transformed him into a Jew, itself a breakthrough in an industry wary of confronting antisemitism.
During the first three-quarters of the last century, implications of homosexuality were delivered in coded references, but the references came often and were understood by those in the know. The gestures of camp proliferated, and screenplays were imbued with subliminal longing. There may have been no gay intentions behind The Wizard of Oz (1939) but gay men seized upon its theme of companionship among outcasts and the hoped for world “somewhere over the rainbow.”
Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film is published by TCM/Running Press.
Get Hollywood Pride at Amazon here.
Paid link
