Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to StonewallRapacious dykes, self-loathing closet cases, hustlers, ambiguous sophisticates, and sadomasochistic rich kids: most of what America thought it knew about gay people it learned at the movies. A fresh and revelatory look at sexuality in the Great Age of movie making, Screened Out shows how much gay and lesbian lives have shaped the Big Screen. Spanning popular American cinema from the 1900s until today, distinguished film historian Richard Barrios presents a rich, compulsively readable analysis of how Hollywood has used and depicted gays and the mixed signals it has given us: Marlene in a top hat, Cary Grant in a negligee, a pansy cowboy in The Dude Wrangler. Such iconoclastic images, Barrios argues, send powerful messages about tragedy and obsession, but also about freedom and compassion, even empowerment. Mining studio records, scripts, drafts (including cut scenes), censor notes, reviews, and recollections of viewers, Barrios paints our fullest picture yet of how gays and lesbians were portrayed by the dream factory, warning that we shouldn't congratulate ourselves quite so much on the progress movies - and the real world -- have made since Stonewall. Captivating, myth-breaking, and funny, Screened Out is for all film aficionados and for anyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and drawn strength and a sense of identity from what they saw on screen, no matter how fleeting or coded. |
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Contents
Silent | 11 |
Speaking plainly | 33 |
Codes of Behavior | 51 |
The Naked Moon | 77 |
Pansies and Lesbos of 1933 | 91 |
Legions and Decency | 119 |
Turnabout LIFE IN A CODED WORLD | 141 |
Reluctant Flamboyance FORTIES ESCAPISM | 163 |
Something Evil | 243 |
That Touch of mink SEX AND THE SIXTIES | 271 |
The Wild Side | 289 |
Im No Queer He Lied | 313 |
Open Season | 335 |
An Epilogue | 359 |
Notes on Sources | 363 |
Selected Bibliography | 373 |
Other editions - View all
Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall Richard Barrios Limited preview - 2005 |
Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall Richard Barrios Limited preview - 2005 |
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