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Screened Out: Gay images in film
Beginning June 4
Turner Classic Movies
www.tcm.com
Saturday Night Out
Saturdays in June, midnight
Sundance Channel
www.sundancechannel.com
Independent Film Channel Gay Night
June 21, beginning at 8:30 p.m.
www.ifctv.com
'Semper Fi'
June 25, 8:30 p.m.
Showtime
www.sho.com
Alonso Duralde
www.alonsoduralde.com
Don’t miss these 'Screened Out' movies
THE EARLY YEARS
'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
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HOME > SOVO SCENE > TELEVISION
By: ZACK HUDSON
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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 ...
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