Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: Michael Koresky On Hollywood’s Queer History

The history of mainstream filmmaking is prone to whiggish readings. The story is that Hollywood, an industry of entertainment and representation, has moved forward in a pleasing, gradually liberal-minded direction with every decade, enfranchising more audiences, capturing more imaginations, all for positive and idealistic reasons. 

Michael Koresky’s excellent new book, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, troubles this idea. Training his eye on a period not generally known for its celebration of non-normative sexuality or gender expression, Koresky demonstrates how queerness occupied a complex, often contradictory position in the industry. He writes, “Future generations have come to accept on-screen images of the past as simply the way things were, but to believe people were naive rather than part of a heavily policed system is to misunderstand where popular art comes from.” 

Frequently, gay filmmakers flourished and perished not because of their sexuality but because of their box-office performance, a shrewd observation Koresky develops as he charts the inception and death of the Hays Code, the fascinating stories behind films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, and the ever-shifting adaptations of works by writers like Tennessee Williams. 

Koresky’s style, honed at the online publication Reverse Shot, which he co-founded, and at the Museum of the Moving Image, where he acts as senior curator, has always foregrounded clarity and rigorous attention. This book is a wonderful example of what he can do. We chatted over the phone about Sick and Dirty, how we might alter our perceptions of Hollywood’s embattled past, and the challenge of writing in-depth criticism today. 

This book feels like an attempt to put some nuance back into a collective conversation about representation in cinema and how we view it. How did you approach the subject matter here? 

There are so many reasons I wanted to write a book about queerness in Hollywood and so many different motivations for finally doing it after years of wanting to. I happened upon films like The Children’s Hour and Tea and Sympathy, and showing them to students, as I do in the prologue, was kind of the major introductory impetus. But it made me realize that everything deserves a level of nuance and analysis. In a moment where I think people are actually really craving nuance and they’re not getting it anywhere.

Also people are just so terrified of having the wrong opinion, whatever right or wrong means. Going back and looking at these films, I realized that that’s complete B.S. Something stands the test of time because it’s complicated or because it’s actually engaging with its subject in a nuanced, difficult way. It’s never the film that is made at the moment because it’s trying to do the right thing or be the right thing or make you feel the right way. Movies and art—movies that are considered art—are always doing something a little more complicated and nothing that endures ever was the politically expedient thing in that moment.

In some ways, Sick and Dirty feels like a departure from your memoir Films of Endearment in terms of its more historical, contextual outlook. At the same time, there’s very much a personal thread in the new book, almost necessarily so.

I think it’s a tricky line to walk when you write about art and you bring “I” in. I spent years sort of trying to take other people’s “I” voices out of their critical writing and then, with Films of Endearment, I jumped right in. But I did want to move along into something a little more historical and something that was more research-based.

At the same time, yes, you’re right. There is obviously the personal aspect. I feel these movies deeply or I feel the subject matter deeply because they’re a part of me and because I was born at a certain time and because I came of age at a certain time. Would I have the same response to these movies if I were born 10 years earlier or 10 years later, considering the AIDS crisis and how that defines a certain generation of gay men specifically?

If I were born in ‘69, maybe I wouldn’t forgive some of these movies for their transgressions. If I were born in 1989, maybe I wouldn’t be as attuned to the fears of that generation and how they colored every interaction that we had and how they color our interactions with art as well as other people. So, I do think bringing the personal in in some cases is really elucidating. I’m not going to say it’s important because not every book has to do that, but it did feel important to me to be personal at the same time that I was delving into the histories of mostly long-dead people. 

I found the structure of Sick and Dirty to be really dynamic. It’s bookended by two William Wyler adaptations of Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, which is about two headmistresses accused of homosexuality: the 1936 film These Three and the 1961 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine. But within that, you explore an entire generation of American cinema. 

Yeah, for me, structure is everything. I don’t think that I can embark on any kind of creative project without feeling like there’s a real shape to it. In this case, it’s my thesis that these 25 years, the years of the Hollywood production code, are bookended by these two adaptations of The Children’s Hour. I had never seen anyone write that before. The production code officially ended in ‘68 when it was dismantled, but 1961 is the year they added the amendment to the code that sex perversion, a.k.a. homosexuality, could be shown on screen. I thought, “Oh, that’s really, really interesting.” 

There never was an outwardly gay character in a movie before that. We know there were, but they could never say so. Shirley MacLaine coming clean about her love for Audrey Hepburn in that film is truly a groundbreaking moment, however tragic and terrible. So I thought, “Okay, Lillian Hellman comes to Hollywood at the moment of [film censor and Hays Code enforcer] Joseph Breen’s ascendance, and one of her first assignments is adapting her own play and making it into a heterosexual love triangle. And then 25 years later to the year, she and William Wyler try ‘to do it right.’” 

I thought this really was the era and a chance to light upon films that are not only interesting for their queer makers or their queer content under the surface or behind the scenes, but that also start to create a narrative that moves towards that moment of change. You certainly start to feel it post-war and then going through the 1950s, the standards and the tenets of the code are being chipped away. By the time you get to The Children’s Hour, you have the makings of this faux revolution, which is put in place by people who wanted to make money on movies.

That’s the thing about Hollywood. We’re not talking about altruistic, great political artists here. We’re talking about money people. That’s why ultimately the grand change that happens in ’61 is kind of backwards. What it does is it actually sets everything back. That’s why this is so complicated. “These movies are progressive, these movies are conservative,” none of them are doing any one thing. They’re goodness and badness tied up together and that makes them more interesting to watch than most.

It’s interesting because I think most people, even if only implicitly, believe in the idea that political progress proceeds chronologically. The past was bad, the present is better. Your book troubles that concept. 

Yeah, I mean, to tell you the truth, one of the first things I say when I teach a class called “Queerness in American Cinema,” which I taught at New School and NYU and which is cited in the book, is that there is no true linearity to queer history. If we think about the way queer history works, there is no before and after. Pre-Stonewall, post-Stonewall, pre-Obergefell, post-Obergefell. That’s all lies. That’s the narrative we tell ourselves to believe that we live in a truly progressive society. That’s something that we have to tell ourselves to keep going and I think it’s the same with art.

Everything is two steps forward, three steps back and I think that’s definitely the case with queer history. We can never just rest on our laurels. We can never pretend like we’re living in a post-gay society as people did during the Obama era. We have to also see art the same way. And if we’re talking about Hollywood art, I mean, give me a break. These movies may have been inspirational to people in some ways, and the true artistry may register and may come out and may make us feel like there’s light on the horizon. But Hollywood’s always going to operate based on the bottom online, which is money.

So, if you make a movie suddenly in 1961 and you can put gay people in it and it doesn’t turn out to be a hit, you can just bury the gays again. And it’s very easy to do so. Or if you have a successful film in which the gay character is villainous and gets shot and you can cheer when that gay villain dies, then you’ll see that for another decade or two. 

The book is so focused on conversations back and forth between studio heads and film producers who were dead set on getting these movies made with these expressions that they said that they thought were important. They were doing it because they wanted to create sensational products, certainly within the ’50s: Suddenly, Last Summer, any Tennessee Williams film, and finally The Children’s Hour. They thought these movies would be hits because the audience appetite was opening up and they were scared of television taking away the power of Hollywood. I say at the end, it’s not a book of heroes. It’s a book of incremental steps and incremental steps always have backslides. 

You paint vivid portraits of figures like Dorothy Arzner, at the time the only female director in Hollywood, who seemed able to live semi-openly as queer people in the industry. And yet it obviously wasn’t like that for everyone. 

It’s hard because you can be successful one day and you can be on the bottom the next, and that could be related to your sexuality and that could not be related to your sexuality. There’s the story of George Cukor [director of Gaslight, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady, among others] being summoned into Louis B. Mayer’s office and being asked point blank, “Are you a homosexual?” Cukor’s honest response didn’t trigger his getting fired, basically Louis B. Mayer turned a blind eye. That wouldn’t have happened if George Cukor was directing flop after flop. He was instantly successful coming from the stage and he was directing Best Picture nominees in the early 1930s. He was valued and he was valued throughout his entire career.

Even though people in the industry knew that he was gay, he was never in danger of losing his career. A filmmaker who I love that I don’t really write about here, Mitchell Leisen, he was a gay director often compared to Kurosawa and his screwball comedies are, in my opinion, as good as Leo McCarey or Howard Hawks. People kind of forgave him for his homosexuality when he was making really big hits. But by the early ’50s, when television was coming in and a certain generation of filmmakers was trying to find their way in this new regime, Leisen’s movies started flopping. By the end of the ’50s, a lot of people had turned against him for his perceived overly sexual behavior with young male actors. 

Dorothy Arzner was very clearly a lesbian. She was dressed in men’s clothes all the time. She had beautiful starlets draped across her in publicity photos. She was never attached to a man. She lived with a woman for 40 years. And in the early ’30s, she was directing one hit after another. When she tried to leave Paramount, the head of the studio was so upset that he effectively blackmailed her into staying. By 1943, when she was filming what turned out to be her last movie, First Comes Courage, she got pneumonia and she had to be replaced by a man. Of course, because she was the only woman directing in Hollywood. That was basically it. She had been directing a lot of not particularly big movies and she decided that enough was enough for herself so she left. She didn’t need that industry anymore. Hollywood is a homophobic world, but not as naively homophobic as maybe we would think. 

I’m curious how your own critical sensibility developed. It often feels like we’re mired in a very binary way of thinking and talking about media, both past and present. Good vs. bad, prudish vs. overly sexualized, etc. etc. 

I think we all go through that phase of wanting a movie to be sort of politically oriented around our best selves. That can be, after a while, really suffocating. And also hypocritical because we’re never our best selves. We may try to project that and pretend like we are. I think one fine-tunes their critical sensibilities and faculties when they’re at a certain age, when you’re really trying to become knowledgeable and worldly and you have to kind of put your stake in the ground and say, “This is me and this is what I believe and these are the ways in which these other pieces of art or objects or people do not fit into my worldview and therefore it’s wrong and I’m right.”

Some of that stuff sticks with you and becomes sort of residual. I certainly remember when I was coming of age and I started to really dislike things on aesthetic levels that were all tied up with my sense of them being politically right or wrong. I still may hate some of those movies. I hate Forrest Gump and American Beauty to this day. But that kind of entrenchment within principles when you watch films can also blind you to the nuances. It’s something I still grapple with.

The way I thought about cinema was maybe slightly more aligned with how Vito Russo talked about it in The Celluloid Closet, which is both a guiding light and something that I push against in this book. Vito Russo’s writing is essential to anyone ever who wants to write about gay or lesbian themes, but it was written in a necessarily angry tone and it was all about creating a litany of cinematic abuses against us. I’m not as interested in that anymore. 

Can you talk about the prologue and epilogue to Sick and Dirty?

I thought it was important to remind people that we aren’t as progressed as we might think we are. When The Children’s Hour came out in 1961, the critical response was highly negative. You had critics saying, “Well, come on, this is 1961. I don’t need to be told that lesbians are people too.” Critics thought they were so incredibly progressive and I think that that’s still the way critics are today. The superior attitude that critics have over film and over filmmakers is sort of interesting. They think they’re ahead of the curve with everything. Critics and arts writers may need to step back and be a little more humble with the way they talk about art. 

When I showed these movies to young queer and queer-adjacent and queer-curious students in my classes, they really were responding emotionally, identifying with these characters and these tragic or quasi-tragic narratives. Part of the reason for writing this book was to figure out what is the emotional cultural currency of these texts to young people today. And what does that say about where we are? If young queer people are identifying with Martha in The Children’s Hour or they’re identifying with Tom Lee in Tea and Sympathy, then clearly they are still dealing with cultural and emotional traumas around family and acceptance and marginalization, and it’s absurd to think that that will have changed to the point of being gone in the 21st century.

I started writing this about four years ago, and every year something awful would happen in the queer community, especially to trans people, and watching that erosion over these years has been really eye-opening and sad. I was making changes to the text right up to the day before we had to send it to the printer because I had to keep updating these horrors that kept happening to our community. So, to pretend like these issues are isolated or old is insulting. 

What place do you think Hollywood is in right now? 

I guess we’ve all been hand-wringing over this question for a number of years now. Obviously this would have elicited a slightly different answer at the height of the pandemic when we were scared that the retrenchment to home viewing was going to eradicate the big-screen experience.

I think that I’ve become more hopeful that that’s not the case over the past couple years and certainly as someone who is programming theaters and just generally seeing what the repertory community is like at the moment. Of course that is the privilege of living within certain metropolitan enclaves, more liberal-minded, artistically-minded communities. This would not be the case for every place across the country and I have to remember that. But I do think that there’s a general move towards an appreciation of cinephilia and its history that I have noticed happening over the last few years that I didn’t necessarily notice 5 to 10 years ago. 

I think there’s a fatigue out there with the products that we’re being fed. The streaming so-called revolution 10 years ago or 15 years ago was still, at that point, resulting in products that were attracting real filmmakers and real artists and people who were putting some care and time into the production of what they were doing. It really does feel now that everything is just sort of this homogenized, artless, textureless slop. And I think that there’s been a lot of realization of that. Even when I talk to people who sort of casually watch TV or movies, I get the general sense that no one thinks this is a really great moment for culture. Sometimes when it’s a really bad moment for mainstream culture, that’s a really good moment for the less mainstream side of things, a better moment for the counterculture to emerge. I’m hoping that that turns out to be the case. I’m just getting the sense that a lot more interesting stuff is bubbling up.