If you know anything about me and this newsletter, you know that I adore classic Hollywood. I love watching it, I love reading about it, I love writing about and talking about it. You’ll also know that I am particularly enamored of anything having to do specifically with queerness in old Hollywood, which continues to be a fruitful site of research and writing. No matter how much we dig into the period, there’s always something more to see, some new way of understanding the ways in which classical Hollywood, for all of its avowed hostility to queer people, often proved remarkably amenable to evoking its specter.

Enter Sick and Dirty, the new book from noted film historian Michael Koresky. The book runs from roughly to the 1930s to the 1960s, documenting the many ways that queerness managed to manifest itself in Hollywood films of the period, whether as a structuring absence–as happened during the 1930s to the early 1950s–or more blatantly, as came to be the case the more that the Code became detached from broader American society. In Koresky’s capable hands we meet some of the most remarkable queer figures of classic Hollywood, from directors like Dorothy Arzner (one of the few women directors to have a notable career during the period) and George Cukor (whose sexuality was an open secret and who was known for his parties) to queer, or queer-adjacent, stars like Farley Granger and Judy Garland. In one way or another, these creative folks managed to imbue even the most conservative of film texts with an undeniable queer frisson.

There are some writers who have a knack for combining scholarly and historical rigor with accessibility, and I think it’s safe to say that Korseky is very much in the ranks of such talented film writers. He has a real knack for finding important details about the lives and work of his subjects, weaving together a fascinating tale that situates the films of classical Hollywood against the broader backdrop in which they were created. Obviously he draws our attention to what was going on in the US at large–including, notably the House Un-American Activities Committee and its action–but he also focuses in particular on the Production Code which, for most of its existence, mandated against the presence of homosexuality in the movies.

As Koresky notes, the Production Code–which came into effect in the early 1930s and exerted a stranglehold on the movie industry as a whole–was a remarkable institution. For much of its heyday it was the province of the notoriously prissy and fussy and domineering Joseph Breen, who didn’t pull any punches when it came to imposing his will on the studios and their output. Due to the fact that almost all of the studios needed the Production Code Administration’s seal in order to get mass release, it’s easy to see how Breen came to wield so much influence.

In some cases, as Korseky documents, the Code ensured that even stories that were about queerness in origin were ultimately turned into something else entirely. The first screen adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, for example, became the film These Three, in which the ruinous central secret is adultery rather than sublimated lesbian desire. Even more egregiously, Crossfire (released in 1947) was based on the novel The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks, went from being about militant homophobia to antisemitism. In both cases, however, the cultural awareness of the presence of queerness in the original text ensured that it became notable in the films precisely by its structuring absence.

Some authors and filmmakers, however, delighted in thwarting the PCA. Take, for example, the blazingly queer Suddenly, Last Summer, based on the play by Tennessee Williams (for my own take on that particular film, click here). At first glance it might seem like just the type of film that the PCA would forbid, and Koresky provides a fascinating and enjoyable chronicle of its path to the screen. As with so many other films produced under the Code, queerness becomes ever more noticeable by its very absence. Only a very obtuse viewer, or one that was quite willing to engage in the same kind of blindness and prudery as Breen, would find themselves unable to see and sense and hear the queerness in a film like Suddenly, Last Summer (the same is true of many of the other film adaptations of Williams’ work, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).

As the 1950s bled into the 1960s, however, it became harder and harder to enforce the Code, meaning that studios and directors were able to show more and more queerness. Even with the relaxation, though, it was still more often for queer folks to meet tragic endings–as Shirley MacLaine’s Martha Dobie does in The Children’s Hour–or for queerness to be a trembling but ephemeral presence, as in Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy. Even as American culture more broadly came into contact with queerness in the arts, Hollywood continued to drag its feet.

Even so, the queer figures in these films tantalize and beguile us, whether as murderous monsters as in Rope or as doomed heroines as in The Children’s Hour. The power of a book like Sick and Dirty lies in its ability to deeply excavate the painful and conflicted histories of queerness in Hollywood. As Koresky repeatedly reminds us, it’s far too simplistic to dismiss these films as relics of an earlier period. Instead, their importance stems in no small part from the fact that we can still feel their pull and their allure. They may be “problematic,” and they may represent an age of repression, but queerness still has a power that even the PCA and its zealots could never entirely eradicate. If anything, their very attempts to repress it merely gave it that much more potency.

Korseky ends by arguing that these films still have much to teach us, even in an age in which queerness in the cinema has become rather banal and accepted (though this could well change now that Trump and the anti-queer right is in the ascendant). Indeed, I very much appreciated the way that he frequently drew on his experience teaching them to show how films like Tea and Sympathy, with its story about a young man lost in a soup of toxic masculinity and trying to find his way, continue to resonate with today’s similarly lost youth. Though it’s been quite a while now since I taught in a college classroom, I do remember the joy I felt at seeing my students experience such gems as All About Eve and All That Heaven Allows for the first time, and it’s good to see that this continues.

If I have a complaint about this book, it’s that it does belabor the point a bit when it comes to The Children’s Hour and its various adaptations. Obviously it is a very important film, and it’s one that has clearly shaped the way that Koresky engages with queer cinema from old Hollywood, but his engagement with it does tend to overshadow some of the other films with which he engages.

Aside from this small nitpick, I found Sick and Dirty to be a worthwhile addition to the existing scholarship on queerness in old Hollywood, and I appreciate Korseky’s engagement with some of the major figures in feminist and queer film theory and history. For all that the powers-that-be attempted to expunge all sorts of “perversion” from the world of the moving image, the presence of the films discussed in this book put the lie to their power. Queerness, then as now, is a force that can never totally be eradicated.

A stunningly well-researched and thoughtful account of queerness during the Golden Age of Hollywood. And, overall, a hard book to read. Not because of the sheer volume of information, which while extensive is organized so well that I never found myself lost. It’s because of the feeling it left me with. When it comes to queerness—to its representation in media, its sociological standing—we’ve come so far, but we still have such a ways to go. There is still such a pervasive sense of “otherness” that is all at once ostracizing and a point of pride. I don’t know whether to feel hopeful or jaded. It’s something I’ll have to sit with.