For generations, members of the LGBTQ+ community in Hollywood needed to be discreet about their lives but—make no mistake—they were everywhere, both in front of and behind the camera.
On the eve of the twentieth century, in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, one of the earliest attempts at a sound film depicted two men dancing together as a third plays the violin. It’s only a few minutes long, but this cornerstone of early cinema captured a queer moment on film. It would not be the last.
With Hollywood Pride, renowned film critic Alonso Duralde presents a history spanning from the dawn of cinema through the “pansy craze” of the 1930s and the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, all the way up to today. He showcases the hard-working actors, writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, art directors, and choreographers whose achievements defined the American film industry and charts the evolution of LGBTQ+ storytelling itself—the way mainstream Hollywood decided it would portray (or erase) their lives and the narratives created by queer filmmakers who fought to tell those stories themselves.
Along the way, listeners will encounter a fascinating cast of characters, such as the first generation of queer actors, including J. Warren Kerrigan, Ramon Novarro, and William Haines. Early cinema pioneers like Alla Nazimova and F. W. Murnau helped shape the new medium of moving pictures. The sex symbols, both male (Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and Anthony Perkins) and female (Lizabeth Scott and Greta Garbo), lived under the threat of their private lives undermining their public personas. Underground filmmakers Kenneth Anger and John Waters made huge strides in LGBTQ+ representation with their off-off-Hollywood productions in the 1960s and ’70s. These screen legends paved the way for every openly queer figure in Hollywood today.
Hollywood Pride points to the bright future of LGBTQ+ representation in cinema by revealing the story of the community’s inclusion and erasure, its visibility and invisibility, and its triumphs and tragedies.
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Cinema is often discussed as an empathy machine because of its power to draw our attention deeply into faces, details, and situations we would otherwise miss. But this only works because of cinema’s less-often discussed power to draw our attention away from other details. As much as it illuminates, cinema also obscures. So much so that queer people, people of color, and of course women are often placed into the position of the outsider, fighting their way into a system not designed for them. Hollywood mythologizes the role of the outsider as something romantic but, in reality as a gay Black filmmaker, I can say it’s more often than not exhausting. But then someone like Alonso Duralde and his meticulously researched Hollywood Pride comes along to fill in the staggering blanks of the accepted history with a people’s history. Suddenly we realize that in the fight for authentic queer expression within cinema, we are not just outsiders seeking our way into a foreign land, but in fact this is territory we have a right to. As Duralde uncovers for us with characteristic wit and passion, we find that queer people and queer sensibilities were there from cinema’s inception. After all this time, we were not crazy to read into the subtext or to stare into a cavalcade of supposedly heteronormative realities and gendered faces, and instead see something more like ourselves.
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Justin Simien, filmmaker