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Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness
by Michael Koresky
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 analysis, 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.
"Revelatory... . Koresky wears his erudition lightly, teasing out the mixed messages of code-era films with aplomb. It's a sterling work of film criticism." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Koresky analyzes Judy Garland as a gay icon and probes the portrayal of the social outcast in Tea and Sympathy and in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer. Such movies resonate for queer viewers, Koresky asserts, because they capture the longing for acceptance… . A sensitive response to a rich trove of movies." —Kirkus Reviews
"An engaging and thought-provoking book recommended for LGBTQIA+ and film studies collections." —Library Journal
This information about Sick and Dirty was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Koresky is Editorial Director at New York's Museum of the Moving Image. Previously he held editorial roles with Film at Lincoln Center, Metrograph Cinema, and The Criterion Collection, where he continues to curate and host the Criterion Channel series Queersighted. He has taught at NYU and The New School, and his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, Film Quarterly, and many other publications. He is the author of the memoir Films of Endearment and a monograph on Terence Davies. He lives in Brooklyn.
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