SICK AND DIRTY
Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness
by Michael Koresky
Bloomsbury. 320 pages. $29.99
LUCKY WERE THE STUDENTS enrolled in the course on queerness in American cinema taught by Michael Koresky, film critic and editorial director of the Museum of the Moving Image at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness is the resultant comprehensive study of the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, covering the broad scope of censorship by the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the “Hays Code” after the man who adopted and enforced it. The book is both erudite and accessible, an uncompromising academic analysis of landmark films, writers, directors, and actors circumventing restrictions against any implication of “sex perversion.”
The title comes from William Wyler’s 1961 film version of Lillian Hellman’s groundbreaking 1934 Broadway play The Children’s Hour (one of three iterations). In the film, longtime friends Martha Dobie (played by Shirley MacLaine) and Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn), co-owners of a private boarding school for girls, are accused of a lesbian relationship by a conniving child. Near the end, MacLaine delivers a searing monologue, confessing Martha’s true desires for Karen, saying she feels “so damn sick and dirty I can’t stand it anymore!”
Even Martha’s shameful confession, coming as the Hays Code era waned, was an improvement over earlier films that eliminated all queer content. Wyler’s 1936 adaptation of Hellman’s play, retitled These Three, had bleached out any hint of unacceptable passion by adding a heteronormative love triangle. Other films of the era, like Crossfire (1947), adapted from the novel The Brick Foxhole, were sanitized to remove “unacceptable” hints of homosexuality. In Alfred Hitchcock’s single-take “aesthetics” experiment Rope (1948), “devious pursuits and bodiless longing” are concealed in plain sight by the distractions of technique. Rope underscores Koresky’s recurrent theme that there is a “chasm between what is said and what is shown,” that “what’s happening in a movie is often just off camera.”
The chasm narrows after the “provocative ambiguity” of gayness in Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956) becomes unequivocal in the electrically charged climax of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), as a traumatized Elizabeth Taylor recounts the death by cannibalism of her louche cousin Sebastian Venable. Koresky rightly contends that these films laid the foundations for William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970), Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982), Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Milk (2008), Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991), Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), and countless others in New Queer Cinema.
Koresky’s engaging, spirited discussions—supported by a thirteen-page index, a twelve-page bibliography, a six-page glossary of films, and eight complementary photo pages—serve as a superb reference guide. Sick and Dirty deserves space on the shelf beside Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet and Chelsea McCracken and Matt Connolly’s 100 Queer Films Since Stonewall.
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Robert Allen Papinchak is a writer based in Valley Village, CA.
