Sick and Dirty
Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nonfiction
AN ALLSTORA'S QUEER HISTORY 101 BOOK CLUB PICK
"An absorbing landmark of film criticism." --The Chicago Tribune, "The 10 Best Books of the Year"
A blazingly original history celebrating the persistence of queerness onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the dark days of the Hollywood Production Code.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code severely restricted what Hollywood cinema could depict. This included "any inference" of the lives of homosexuals. In a landmark 1981 book, gay activist Vito Russo famously condemned Hollywood's censorship regime, lambasting many midcentury films as the bigoted products of a "celluloid closet."
But there is more to these movies than meets the eye. In this insightful, wildly entertaining book, cinema historian Michael Koresky finds new meaning in "problematic" classics of the Code era like Hitchcock's Rope, Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy, and-bookending the period and anchoring Koresky's narrative-William Wyler's two adaptations of The Children's Hour, Lillian Hellman's provocative hit play about a pair of schoolteachers accused of lesbianism.
Lifting up the underappreciated queer filmmakers, writers, and actors of the era, Koresky finds artists who are long overdue for reevaluation. Through his brilliant inquiry, Sick and Dirty reveals the "bad seeds" of queer cinema to be surprisingly, even gleefully subversive, reminding us, in an age of book bans and gag laws, that nothing makes queerness speak louder than its opponents' bids to silence it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This revelatory study from Koresky (Films of Endearment), editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, examines how midcentury Hollywood films explored queer themes under the Motion Picture Production Code, which only allowed movies to "imply or metaphorically evoke the existence of lesbian and gay life." Koresky brackets the book by comparing director William Wyler's two adaptations of the 1934 play The Children's Hour, about two female teachers accused of having an affair. Despite Wyler's 1935 version substituting the play's lesbian protagonists with a heterosexual love triangle, Koresky argues it maintained a distinctly queer "expression of repressed desire." He contends that the more faithful 1961 adaptation rendered its queer protagonists with sympathy but propagated the problematic "tragic lesbian" trope by ending with a suicide. Filling in the decades in between, Koresky suggests that Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, about two queer-coded murderers hiding a body in their living room trunk, can be read as an allegory for life in the closet even as it veers into "retrograde gay villainy," and that Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer reflects screenwriter Tennessee Williams's "fraught relationship" to his own homosexuality. Koresky wears his erudition lightly, teasing out the mixed messages of code-era films with aplomb. It's a sterling work of film criticism.
