Sean Burns
There was no such thing as homosexuality in the Golden Age of Hollywood. At least not officially.
Movies of that era were subject to the Motion Picture Production Code. Better known as the Hays Code, the industry’s guidelines for self-censorship were named after Will Hays, president of the organization that would eventually become the Motion Picture Association of America and more recently, the Motion Picture Association. (It’s cleaner.) Chief among the Puritanical regulations was an edict that “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.” This meant that the love that dare not speak its name could not be spoken of at all, nor even so much as implied.
As policed by Hays’ easily excited and stridently Catholic enforcer, Joseph Ignatius Breen – who had the charming habit of referring to his Jewish colleagues as “dirty lice” and “the scum of the scum of the Earth” – movies were rigorously parsed at the script stage and purged of any semblance of deviant sexuality, which the dedicated artists and craftspeople of Hollywood’s heyday then slyly found ways to sneak back into the pictures, directly under the noses of the censors.
Critic and curator Michael Koresky’s fantastic new book Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness surveys 25 years of subversive subtext – or in some cases, plain text – roiling and rumbling under the Technicolor surfaces of Hollywood films that followed the letter of the Hays Code but not the spirit. It’s a rollicking work of scholarship that includes not just the pioneering career of Hollywood’s first lesbian director Dorothy Arzner, but also a fresh reading of Rope that sees Hitchcock’s formal trickery as another expression of the script’s hiding-in-plain-sight homosexuality, while still finding time for some hilariously bitchy bickering between Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams during the making of Suddenly, Last Summer. Koresky even pulls off an admirable job of explaining what the deal is with gay guys and Judy Garland.
But what’s most valuable about Sick and Dirty, more even than the extensive research and his punchy, insightful prose, is the author’s willingness to take a close, thoughtful look at pictures deemed “problematic” by today’s standards. There are many movies from this era that are now routinely dismissed and sometimes despised by a younger generation concerned with the propriety of representation. “These films, these phantoms, persist because they speak to the unsettled parts of ourselves that don’t fit into acceptable standards of contemporary queerness,” Koresky writes. “The parts we hush away, the parts that creep into our thoughts at night when we draw the shades and close our eyes after a full, tiring day of being so sure and pure and proud and righteous.”
The book takes its title not, as I’d assumed, from a Velvet Underground lyric but rather from a line of dialogue from The Children’s Hour. Director William Wyler’s 1961 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s Broadway shocker has always been somewhat ignominious in more progressive circles due to its depiction of two schoolteachers, played by Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, whose small town lives are destroyed by salacious rumors regarding their sexuality. (MacLaine basically apologizes for the movie in the film version of The Celluloid Closet.) Yet when Koresky recently showed the picture to his NYU students, he was struck by the intensity of their reactions. This awkward, outmoded old movie still packed a punch.
Sick and Dirty is bookended by Wyler’s two adaptations of Hellman’s play. His 1936 These Three was forced to de-gay the source material to an almost comical extent, straightening out the central scenario, though Koresky still spots some stray innuendos sneaking in from the sidelines. Twenty-five years later, The Children’s Hour was Wyler’s attempt to finally do right by Hellman’s 1934 text, ironically by updating it to an era for which it was no longer suited. Critics dismissed the movie as overwrought and out of touch. (Koresky uncovers a shockingly homophobic Pauline Kael bon mot that didn’t make it into her collected volumes.) But those NYU students weren’t wrong to react the way they did to the film’s tragic denouement, which is stunningly acted by MacLaine and retains an awful, unsettling power.
It’s the kind of scene that would cause a lot of overly image-conscious, contemporary critics to write “tropes” and call it a day. I must confess that I myself might have had a more knee-jerk reaction to The Children’s Hour had I not first read Koresky’s book, which places the film and its intentions in a fuller context. This is what great critical writing can do, widening our perspectives and digging around to find a deeper understanding of why certain works endure. Koresky proves that however unfashionable, problematic art is worth reckoning with.
“Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness” is in bookstores now.
