Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood From Edison to Stonewall

by Richard Barrios

Routledge, 320 pp., $29.95

A lighter cousin to Vito Russo’s groundbreaking The Celluloid Closet, this chronicle of gays and lesbians (fictional and real) in Hollywood is exhaustive and well-researched, as well as a compulsively fun read. Barrios is not an academic, but his exploration is thorough, and his expression is wry (Bugs Bunny is “the magnificent androgyne”) and dishy (Cecil Cunningham’s voice is “an extra-dry martini spilled onto a piece of parchment”). The book’s thesis — that gays and lesbians have appeared in coded representations since the advent of the cinema and should be considered in context — is largely optimistic. Barrios celebrates the noncensorious “pansy craze” of pre-Code Hollywood and discovers winking “insider” references in such unlikely sources as Betty Boop cartoons. Not every reader may embrace these caricatures, but Barrios reclaims them convincingly, with a wealth of primary sources (such as memos from studio moguls) and illustrations that document the strange history of the queer image. — Marrit Ingman

This article appears in December 6 • 2002.

A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.

SUPPORT US

Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.