'Algie, the Miner' (1912)
June 4, 8 p.m.
“Billy Quirk’s performance is, I think, the first major statement on the screen of the portrayal of a gay character that we know about.”
Richard Barrios
'The Broadway Melody' (1929)
June 4, 11:45 p.m.
“I think it’s the second film to win the Best Picture Oscar. It’s a backstage musical. Why wouldn’t there be gays there?”
Alsonso Duralde
GAYS BEFORE THE CODE(starts June 6)
'Queen Christina' (1933)
June 7, 1 a.m.
"It’s got an especially butch Greta Garbo kissing a woman on the mouth and talking about how she won’t die an old maid, she’ll die a bachelor.”
Alonso Duralde
MEN AND WOMEN BEHIND BARS
'Caged' (1950)
June 11, 10:30 p.m.
“Not a lot of people have seen that one, but it is THE women’s prison movie.”
Alonso Duralde
THE DARK SIDE: FILM NOIR AND CRIME
'The Big Combo' (1955)
June 13, 8 p.m.
“As with any married couple in 1950s film or television, male characters Mingo and Fante sleep in twin beds, just like Lucy and Ricky.”
Richard Barrios
HORROR (starts June 18)
'Voodoo Island' (1957)
June 19, midnight
“Boy, there she is, and she spends a good deal of the movie rejecting the advances of the hunk, and letting the heroine know that she’s interested.”
Richard Barrios
COMEDY
'Turnabout' (1940)
June 20, 11:15 p.m.
“The male and female lead characters switch bodies, and hijinks ensue.”
Alonso Duralde
CODE BUSTERS/OUT AND OPEN (starts June 25)
'Victim' (1961)
June 26, 4:30 a.m.
“I’m stunned that anybody’s showing ‘Victim’ on American television. It’s probably the first major motion picture in the sound era to be sympathetic to homosexuals.”
Alonso Duralde
'The Killing of Sister George' (1968)
June 28, 2:30 a.m.
“When June’s job is threatened, it’s not because she’s a big dyke it’s because she drinks too much and says the wrong thing.”
Alonso Duralde
Even as far back as 1933, Hollywood was hard pressed to deny the influence of gay artists. But it sure tried.
Still, as shown by the 44 movies that play during Turner Classic Movies' month-long "Screened Out: Gay Images in Film," there were far more ways to bring gay characters to life on screen than there were to eliminate them.
In honor of Pride month, other cable channels also plan special programming. The Sundance Channel airs gay shows Saturday nights throughout the month, including documentaries like "Gay Sex in the '70s" and features like "Loggerheads." The Independent Film Channel sets aside June 21 for an entire night of gay-themed movies, including "Fabulous" and "The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love." And on June 25, Showtime airs "Semper Fi," a documentary about Iraq War vet Jeff Key, a gay marine who wrote a one-man show about his experiences under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
But of all the gay programs planned for June, Atlanta-based TCM's Screened Out is by far the most comprehensive undertaking.
Much of the Screened Out programming, which airs throughout June on Monday and Wednesday nights, was based on the book “Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall,” by author Richard Barrios.
Most of the characters and issues in the selected movies weren’t written explicitly as gay.
Gay men and lesbians who watched movies before the 1970s found themselves playing sleuths to root out characters with mannerisms and dialogue that resonated with gay viewers.
“You got out of it what you wanted to get out of it, and sometimes what you needed to get out of it,” says Barrios, who co-hosts some of the Screened Out movies with regular TCM host and film savant Robert Osborne.
In 2007, many of the images compiled in Screened Out seem like dated stereotypes of men flitting about and stamping off in a huff, or severe, crafty women who corrupt young girls through intimidation.
Film critic Alonso Duralde, author of “101 Must See Movies for Gay Men,” asserts that the early seemingly gay characters — offensive today or not — cannot be discounted.
“It’s very easy to sort of look back historically, with a limited amount of context, and say, ‘Oh, this is despicable,’” Duralde says. “It’s still important historically, even if it rankles us now. We can’t forget that playing to those images used to be okay.”
BACK IN 1933, AN OPENLY GAY New york nightclub performer named Jean Malin was called to Hollywood during the "Pansy Craze," an early '30s fad in which gay entertainers became popular among straight crowds in urban centers.
Malin made two movies for RKO, embodying characters with his own distinctly effete mannerisms and speech. Before Malin made his second picture, “Double Harness,” RKO released “Our Betters,” a romantic comedy starring Tyrell Davis as Ernest, a mincing, heavily rouged fop who tries, unsuccessfully, to seduce leading lady Violet Kemble Cooper.
Ernest’s scenes were few, but they raised an uproar among religious leaders, and in part, helped to reactivate the Hays Production Code, the unyielding censorship guidelines imposed on Hollywood from the early '40s until the advent of the current letter rating system in 1967. The Hays Code prohibited most depictions of any sex, but censors used the rules mostly against images of “sexual perversion,” including homosexuality, to prevent openly gay character portrayals.
Malin became one of the first victims of the Hays Code. Bowing to pressure over “Our Betters,” which was based on a play by W.Somerset Maugham, who was gay, and directed by George Cukor, who was also gay, RKO executives demanded that Malin’s scene be cut from the movie. The scene was re-shot, still including an effeminate salesman character, with another actor, Fred Santley, who was not openly gay.
Malin never worked on another movie. His story — and Santley’s performance — reemerge during Screened Out, which airs “Double Harness.”
PRESSURE FROM CENSORS would eventually cut even overtly effeminate characters — whether or not they were written as gay. Movie producers reverted to more stylized and coded ways to bring gay characters out of the invisibility the Hays Code demanded.
“In the forties, you go to much more subtle things — the kind of sleek, sarcastic, subtly evil men, or the gothic women," Barrios explains. "Part of it was the movies had to be more subtle about it. The icons, the things that drew in gays and lesbians, were evolving to the Code along with everything else."
Gay men and lesbians flocked to movie houses in the 1940s and '50s and did find a kindred spirit or two onscreen, according to Barrios.
In 1944, when movie houses were open late for wartime distraction, theaters reported large, late-night lines of women crowding in to see “The Uninvited,” an otherwise unremarkable thriller starring Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey. Cornelia Otis Skinner played Miss Holloway, a nurse with an unusual preoccupation for a former female patient.
“There would be these crowds of what the theater owners said were oddly dressed women," Barrios says. "They would go at off hours, and every line that Miss Holloway would speak, they would react very audibly. It was very obvious what had happened; the movie had become a lesbian cult movie.”
TCM produced cinematic histories of other groups before, including mini-festivals for gay movies. According to TCM Senior Vice President of Programming Charlie Tabesh and Senior Programming Manager Dennis Millay, Screened Out far eclipses any of the network’s previous efforts at highlighting gay characters.
Both Millay and Tabesh say that the network is already receiving e-mails and online messages from disgruntled viewers voicing their disagreement with the series.
“It’s definitely not riling us," Tabesh says. "It’s actually to be expected — some of it at least. I think we’re pretty comfortable with what we’re doing.”
THE HAYS CODE EVENTUALLY IMPLODED, as a new Hollywood and a new rating system emerged in the 1960s. In the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, gay and fey characters popped up on screen, sometimes making considerable impressions.
“It’s amazing that once the Production Code ended, how racy they did get,” Millay says.
But when gay characters and stories found a legitimate spot in the movies, they didn’t immediately find an audience, leaving milestones like “The Killing of Sister George” and “The Boys in the Band” to languish and eventually disappear again.
“Then, after that, when these movies don’t do very well at the box office, you get to this very dark decade which climaxes with ‘Cruising,’” he says, referencing the much-criticized 1980 thriller that put police detective Al Pacino in the middle of New York’s gay leather scene to track down a serial killer.
The movies are coming around to gay issues and characters again, but on the heels of television, Barrios notes.
“Things change, but the evolution has been painfully slow,” he says
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