|
|
 |
 |
April 2001
Open on My Desk
The history of gays and lesbians in Hollywood.
|
By William J. Mann
|
Too often, when the words gay and Hollywood have been paired, the traditional association has been scandal. The literature that's out there has dealt primarily with such things as Confidential magazine's threat to expose Rock Hudson, the secret lesbian loves of Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, or the sensational boy-trading parties supposedly thrown by George Cukor or Cole Porter. Even today, pick up a book or a magazine that emblazons the words Gay Hollywood on its cover and you'll usually find something titillating: the outing of a current celebrity, perhaps, or a juicy exposé of who's queer in Tinseltown. Researching a more serious and thoughtful examination of the gay experience in American cinema therefore necessitated looking beyond traditional published sources. My intent with Behind the Screen, Between the Lines: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood in the Studio Era (which will be published by Viking in October) was to consider the gay experience as other populations in American film history have been considered. There is Neal Gabler's portrait of the Jewish experience in his groundbreaking An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Other books, including Molly Haskell's classic From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Jeanine Basinger's A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, have documented the experiences and contributions of women to American film, from star actresses to the director's chair through the editing room, the writer's department, and beyond.
I determined that finally the same would be done for gay men and lesbians. Having previously written Wisecracker (published in 1998), a biography of the twenties and thirties gay actor William Haines, I was well acquainted with the period, but from the beginning, I knew my book would have to be more than the story of movie stars. I would need to consider the film industry as a whole, exploring not only what it was like for actors who were gay but also for designers, directors, writers, editors, and publicists. I discovered which fields embraced gays and which remained off-limits and the reasons behind such segregation. I knew that these stories, to be fully understood, must be put in context with their times: from the free-loving Roaring Twenties through the conservative Depression years to the progressive flowering that occurred during World War II and the turbulent backlash of the McCarthy era. I chose to end my study in the latter half of the sixties because here the narrative conveniently broke, with both the demise of the studios and the rapid rise of the modern gay movement after the Stonewall riots. In fact, post-Stonewall gay Hollywood offers a radically different paradigm for study: Only in the last three decades has the film industry's homophobic reputation been articulated. One of my more surprising discoveries was that Hollywood hasn't always been the menacing behemoth most studies and memoirs have made it out to be. Although gays certainly faced more than their share of struggles, they also experienced opportunities for creative self-expression in the studios that were unavailable anywhere else in the world at the time -- and without necessarily compromising their integrity or hiding their authentic identities.
Writing gay histories requires a re-evaluation of traditional rules of "evidence." Learning to read between the lines without reading into them is an acquired skill, as is learning to discern the truth as much by what isn't said as what is. The Hollywood press of the studio era is in fact loaded with information on the gay subculture, and I suggest that much of it is there consciously. Researching gay history also requires weighing the vast body of gossip, film lore, and legend -- too often high-handedly dismissed without even cursory consideration by writers consumed by their own seriousness. At the start of my research, I cast my net wide, going through every obituary in Variety from 1905 to 1995, collecting those that contained the usual gay flags: "Lifelong bachelor"; "Survived by a sister and a nephew"; or, most typically and most inaccurately, "There are no immediate survivors." For, of course, there were survivors -- lovers, friends, gay families who knew these people far better than any brother or sister might have. I was fortunate in some instances to find these people, often listed as the informants on death certificates. Frequently younger than their partners, they were still alive and willing to be interviewed. Although I needed always to remain conscious of and sensitive to the shifting social construction of homosexual identity, I believe I succeeded in constructing a platform for a new way of seeing both the Golden Age of Hollywood and the history of American gay men and lesbians.
|
|
|
|
| DISCUSS this article on the message boards. |
|
| a letter to the editor.
|
|
| READ recent feedback.
|
|
