SICK AND DIRTY

A history of queer images.

Koresky, editorial director at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, looks at movies made during the Golden Age of Hollywood, from the early 1930s to the early 1960s, to examine their representation of sexual identity. In contrast to Vito Russo, who argued in The Celluloid Closet (1981) that these movies contributed to the “marginalization, invisibility, and debasement” of gay and lesbian characters, Koresky discovers a more nuanced message: During the 25 years he examines, when the Motion Picture Production Code forbade representations of homosexuality, some movies subversively conveyed “stealthily progressive values,” rejecting “fixed identities” and stereotypical social roles. While movies such as Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, about characters struggling with same-sex attraction, reflected “the irrational, very American fear that queers will infect our most vulnerable, that their ‘sick and dirty’ perversions, once unleashed, are contagious,” other films, such as those directed by Dorothy Arnzer, who herself was gay, revealed the “camaraderie and emotional connection” among women, creating a “protofeminist perspective and a queer sensibility.” Koresky examines the work of many directors, including William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, and Todd Haynes. Alfred Hitchcock, master of anxiety, created movies in which queer sensibility was unstated but implicit: Rebecca, for example, reveals a “queer female eroticism” by Mrs. Danvers toward her deceased employer. In other Hitchcock movies, disruptive forces, roiling below the surface, “put into relief the fragility of the bonds and boundaries of our everyday existence.” Koresky analyzes Judy Garland as a gay icon and probes the portrayal of the social outcast in Tea and Sympathy and in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer. Such movies resonate for queer viewers, Koresky asserts, because they capture the longing for acceptance and vulnerability of those “deemed an aberration.”

A sensitive response to a rich trove of movies.