"Hollywood's Golden Age (of Queer Coding)" Transcript

Hollywood's admittedly casual relationship with the truth protected the American dream from a host of unwanted realities and niggling intrusions. And while lesbians and gay men were often among the architects of that dream, they were never a part of it. It is said that Samuel Goldwyn once suggested filming Radclyffe Hall's notorious The Well of Loneliness, only to be informed by a producer that he could not because the leading character was a lesbian. "So what?" Goldwyn retorted. "We'll make her an American." Apocryphal or not, the simplicity of his solution captured the spirit of the truth. It was not as American as apple pie to be queer, and the closeted visions of countless gay screenwriters, directors, actors and technicians were submerged into the heterosexual, all-American fantasies of the majority. Gay characters and references to the existence of homosexuality were routinely laundered off the screen for the better part of half a century.

And so the Americanization of lesbianism meant simply an unwillingness to deal with it openly, an aping of the American cowardice about sex in general and the American hypocrisy about sexual deviation in particular. Technically. homosexuals were just as invisible onscreen as they were in real life. They continued to emerge, however, as subtextual phantoms representing the very fear of homosexuality. Serving as alien creatures who were nonetheless firmly established as part of the culture in every walk of life, they became the darker side of the American dream. In a society so obsessed with the maintenance of sex roles and the glorification of all things male, sissies and tomboys served as yardsticks for what was considered normal behavior. The discomfort that has consistently arisen in response to "buddy" films springs from the paranoia and fear that surrounds exclusively male relationships. American society has always begun at square one, with the belief that men are never attracted to each other as masculine equals (one of them is always seen as wanting to be a woman or to act like one). Thus the denial of the existence of homosexuality did not suppress the national fear of it but instead served to point it up continu­ally. Nor did this denial belie for long the fact of it in history.

In 1933, less than a year before the release of Queen Christina, Rouben Mamoulian's romantic fantasy starring Greta Garbo as the Swedish monarch, Elizabeth Goldsmith published Christina of Sweden ("A Psychological Biogra­phy"). In reviewing the book and anticipating the film by Mamoulian, Lewis Gannett wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "The one persistent love of Christina's life was for the Countess Ebba Sparre, a beautiful Swedish noble. woman who lost most of her interest in Christina when Christina ceased to rule Sweden . . . the evidence is overwhelming, but will Miss Garbo play such a Christina?"

Garbo did no such thing, of course, but the collision onscreen of her own androgynous sensibility with the fact of Christina's love for male attire and pursuits gave the film a truth of its own. Garbo, who once expressed to Katharine Comell her desire to play in a film version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with herself in the title role and Marilyn Monroe as a young girl ruined by Dorian, created a particular dynamic in Queen Christina, one which penetrated the fundamental deceptions of the script. Her melancholy longings to escape her destiny (marriage) and her deft rejections of a series of male suitors are interrupted in the first half of the film by her encounter with the Countess Ebba. Sparre (Elizabeth Young). Their brief scene together is charged with sexuality and real affection, the only such display in the film between Garbo and another woman. In that scene Garbo lifts the emotional barriers that characterize her encounters with male suitors. When Ebba bursts into the queen's chamber, the two kiss passionately on the lips. Ebba suggests brightly that they go for a sleighride, but Christina tells her sadly that Parliament awaits and that they will see each other that evening. "Oh, no we won't!" Ebba pouts. "You'll be surrounded by musty old men and musty old papers, and I won't be able to get near you." The Queen caresses her face gently and promises that they will soon go away to the country together "for two whole days."

Later, when pressed by a statesman to marry and produce an heir to the throne, Christina defiantly refuses. "But, your majesty." he cries, "you cannot die an old maid!" Dressed now in men's riding clothes, she pauses at the door and replies, "I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor!" and she stomps out of the room. The battle between the heroic tomboy and the tortured, doomed queen is sustained throughout the film, and her love affair with Antonio (John Gilbert) does not resolve it. Her need to escape the role assigned her by life was Christina's true driving passion; Queen Christina makes this abundantly clear.

Gazing out the window, Christina murmurs, "The snow is like a wild sea, One could go out and be lost on it." She flees into the snow a little later, when she discovers that Ebba Sparre has betrayed her love. That is when she meets Antonio, the one man who seems to accept her and love her for all the things that so horrify her court. He falls in love with her, thinking at first that she is a man, and he seems quite willing to explore whatever this strange situation may bring. In an amusing scene, Antonio's servant enters the bedroom at the inn where Christina and Antonio have spent the night, to find that his master is still in bed with the young "man" with whom he had retired the night before. He takes an order for two morning chocolates and withdraws in astonishment.

Accidents such as the collision of Garbo's chemistry and Christina's stubborn maleness, the kind that produce something more than is in the script, happen rarely, though not as a rule in biographies; the lives of famous lesbians and gay men were altered significantly or were not attempted. The need for invisibil­ity is reflected in the very character of the American experience: heroes may certainly not be homosexual. Real-life gays almost never tampered with the illusions; rather, they subscribed to them. In 1946, Cole Porter and Monty Woolley, lifelong friends but not lovers, created their own dismal myth in Warner Brothers' Technicolor musical "biography" of Porter, Night and Day. Porter and his wife Linda, by choosing Cary Grant and Alexis Smith for the title roles, opted for a sophisticated Ozzie and Harriet look while Monty Woolley, playing himself, chose the grand old man of letters motif- pinching the chorus girls and all the rest of the heterosexual repertoire.

The portrayals of noted persons as heterosexual without regard for their true sexuality has never been seen as a serious offense against a person's identity not even by the person whose life is falsified. No, it is better to be straight. And gays believed that. Films such as The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and Khartoum (1966) reflected the care with which their sources masked or denied the homosexuality of Michelangelo and General Charles Gordon, just as uninspired confections of the Fifties such as Valentino (1951), Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and Alexander the Great (1956) bypassed history for the safe illusions held tightly by the majority.

Open contempt for men who are perceived to be like women was not new. In John Ford's Three Bad Men (1926), the grizzly "Bull" (J. Farrell MacDonald) tells a fancy Dan who says he has just reached manhood, "Then you'd better reach again." Essentially the same scene occurs in the "feminist" Adam's Rib (1949), in which David Wayne's Kip, a yardstick sissy par excellence, functions as Katharine Hepbum's girlfriend, a high-class Ethel Mertz to her feminist Lucy Ricardo. Spencer Tracy is clearly uncomfortable with him in spite of Hepbum's defense ("Oh, darling. He's so sweet"). Leaving the room after a heated feminist debate, Wayne says to Hepbum, "Amanda, you've convinced me. I might even go out and become a woman!" When Wayne has gone, Spencer Tracy mutters to Hepbum, "Yeah, and he wouldn't have far to go, either." Hepburn's Amanda can only whisper, "Shhh! He'll hear you," an indication that her feminism, like that of contemporary feminists who want their sons to grow up to be "real men," goes only so far and breaks down at the thought of actually obscuring sex roles altogether.

The rigid belief in the male role and the intolerance that belief engendered was almost always played on a comic level and seldom emerged in the kind of dead serious hostility shown by the crowd on the bus in Up in Arms, who were reacting to the possibility of real homosexuality between two sailors. More often [...]

Yet there was real danger here. War had brought men together in the buddy system, closer than they had ever been before. The all-male environment of the armed services forced to the surface a confusion about the inherent sexuality between men who preferred each other's company but always chose women to prove their masculinity. The fear that these chaste male relationships might in any way be labeled odd or queer was very real, and the movies assured that no hint of perversion would be introduced into such bonding.

There might have been even less suspicion of homosexuality had the level of paranoia surrounding its mention not been so very high. In 1946, Richard Brooks' novel The Brick Faxhole dealt with obsessive masculinity in the military. In It, a homosexual decorator is murdered by a soldier he brings home to his apartment for a drink. Edward Dmytryk's film adaptation, Crossfire (1947), made the victim a Jew and thus became an example of Hollywood's maturity in dealing with antisemitism. The New York Times noted the change in a review but said only that the motivation for the murder had been changed from that in the novel, "to good advantage." The novel's crucial discussion of men's striking out at what they fear in themselves was omitted. It has yet to be raised onscreen with any real awareness of the magnitude of the problem.

Whenever all-male situations were the subject of the movies, whether they involved cowboys, athletes or soldiers, the dream of the free, perpetually adoles­cent male in pure and unsullied comradeship fought with the ever present cultural taboo against male intimacy. Peter Pan, after all, was a fairy tale; grown men had real responsibilities that necessarily included growing up and settling down to marriage with a woman. Yet the opening title of Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste (1926) spoke of the dream.

Love of man for woman waxes and wanes.
Love of brother for brother
is as steadfast as the stars.

Now if only people wouldn't assume that all those loving brothers were as queer as three-dollar bills, men could hug without having nightmares.

Director Clarence Brown spotted the rub. In his Flesh and the Devil (1927), John Gilbert and Lars Hanson play lifelong buddies who separate when one of them marries the woman they both love (Greta Garbo). By the end of the film, Garbo has slept with her husband's friend, precipitating a reluctant duel between the two men. Trying to stop them, she falls through the ice and drowns. At this the men throw down their guns, embrace and walk off into the sunset together, their arms around each other, their bond rejoined following the intrusion of a woman.

Clarence Brown spoke of the situation in an interview. "You can see my problem. How to have the two leading men wind up in each other's arms and not make them look like a couple of fairies?" It was a tough question. The primary buddy relationships in films are those between men who despise homosexuality yet find that their truest and most noble feelings are for each other. There is a misogyny here that [...]

Joan Mellon, in her study of masculinity in the movies, Big Bad Wolves, says that the less violent men were in their film personas, the more likely they were to be interested in heterosexual love. Just the opposite has been true for homoeroticism. The perception of homosexual feelings as a brutal, furtive and dangerous force saw it flourish in films of male bonding and violence. Gentle men in the movies Jimmy Stewart in any "Smalltown, U.S.A." picture or Spencer Tracy in Father of the Bride, for example would never, even subtextually, approach such relationships or feelings. The concept of the gentle man who chooses to love other men does not exist in American film except as slapstick comedy. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had the perfect sissy-buddy relationship throughout their long career, and it is naive now, looking at their films, to assume that they were not aware of and did not consciously use this aspect of their screen relationship to enrich their comedy.

In the films of Laurel and Hardy, their relationship was given a sweet and very real loving dimension. The two often wound up in bed together, and their wives were almost always portrayed as obstacles to their friendship. In a classic example of this, one with unmistakably gay overtones, they play a married couple complete with newbom baby in Their First Mistake (1932), a Hal Roach film directed by George Marshall. Ollie's wife (Mae Busch) complains that he sees too much of Stan and not enough of her, and the two friends discuss the situation.

Stan: Well, what's the matter with her, anyway?
Ollie: Oh, I don't know. She says I think more of you than I do of her.
Stan: Well, you do, don't you?
Ollie: We won't go into that.
Stan: You know what the trouble is?
Ollie: What?
Stan: You need a baby in your house.
Ollie: Well, what's that got to do with it?
Stan: Well, if you had a baby . . . it would keep your wife's mind occupied. you could go out nights with me . . . and she'd never think anything about it.

So they go out and adopt a baby. When they return home with it, they discover that Ollie's wife is suing him for divorce for "alienation of affections." having named Stan Laurel as "the other woman." The remainder of the film is a beautifully timed and performed domestic scene, with Stan and Ollie in bed and the baby between them. The scene climaxes when Stan reaches into his pajama top- as if reaching for a breast to feed the baby and comes up with the baby's bottle, which he has been keeping warm.

All this is charming, sometimes very funny and certainly of no great conse­quence. Yet when one suggests that there may be clues to homosexual behavior in the ways that Laurel and Hardy related to one another, it is as though one were attacking America itself. Charles Barr, in his study Laurel and Hardy, says that "there is something rather absurd about discussing this [the homosex­ual nature of Their First Mistake] seriously at all." In the often infantile, "pre­sexual" nursery world in which Stan and Ollie lived, Barr argues, such behavior would be "natural."

It is fast becoming evident, however, that there is no such thing as a "pre­sexual" age. Notice, too, that it is the "naturalness" of Laurel and Hardy's behavior that Barr and other critics choose to defend, not the sexuality. The homosexuality is unmistakably there; it remains only for people to say that in this case such behavior would be natural to fend off charges of unnaturalness in beloved film figures. And so it is indeed an attack on America itself to suggest that homosexuality is present in the Laurel and Hardy routines. In pointing these things out, one attacks the American illusion—the illusion that there is in fact such a thing as a real man and that to become one is as easy as changing one's name from Marion Morrison to John Wayne. The fact is that comedy has been able to comment on sexual roles more readily than drama could do only because people may dismiss it as impossible farce.

Neglected sissy-buddy relationships exist even in classic cartoons, and a look at Saturday morning television will discover a preponderance of sissy-bully plotlines. Walt Disney may not have liked hearing it, but there are gay overtones in the relationships of more than one pair of beloved animated figures of the classic years. In Pinocchio (1940), Honest John and Gideon, a fox and a cat, are best friends who procure lost boys for sale to an evil coachman who takes them to Pleasure Island. They seduce Pinocchio with the hit song "Heigh Diddley Dee" (the second line of which is "Heigh diddley day, an actor's life is gay"), and away he goes—twice.

In Cinderella (1950), everyone's favorite mice, Jock and Gus-Gus, volunteer to help finish Cinderella's dress in time for the ball. But they are quickly admonished by a female mouse to "leave the sewing to the women" and told to go find "some trimmin'" for the dress. Their relationship grows through their friendship in dangerous times, and later, when Cinderella describes how she was swept off her feet by the handsome prince, Gus-Gus, sighing evenly, puts an arm around Jock's shoulder and holds him close. After a minute, Jock realizes that they are sitting on a log at the side of the road in each other's arms, and homosexual panic seems to set in on the little fellow. Pulling away quickly, he gives Gus-Gus a quizzical look of wary scrutiny, as if to say, "Hmmm, there's something funny about this mouse." And there was. Just a few years after Cinderella, Tom Lee, a shy and sensitive student in Tea and Sympathy, would be told much more forcefully to "leave the sewing to the women." Everyone looked at Tom Lee sort of funny—and scratched their heads, too, just like Jock the mouse.

Again, these interpretations arise invariably from the fear of homosexuality, seldom from the fact of it. The expendability of women in buddy films was one reason for that fear. Heterosexual romance was often just a standard plot ingredient, thrown in at regular intervals because it had to be there, and lacking the emotional commitment that the filmmaker failed to give it. The real emotions in the movies, as well as in the movie industry, have always taken place between men. Men have been the important forces at work, both as instigators of all the action in the pictures and as instigators of the films themselves, by deciding what movies should be made and how. Subtexts pre­sented themselves constantly but were left unresolved, just as the women waited around while the boys recreated their adolescent fantasies, unencumbered by an emotional commitment to anything but each other and a good time.

When screenwriter Gore Vidal discussed the script for Ben-Hur (1959) with director William Wyler, they concluded that the rivalry between Ben-Hur (Charl­ton Heston) and his boyhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd) was insufficiently motivated by a single political scene in which Ben-Hur refuses to aid the Roman cause despite his friend's pleas. Vidal describes the problem.

I proposed the notion that the two had been adolescent lovers and now Messala has returned from Rome wanting to revive the love affair but Ben-Hur does not. He has read Leviticus and knows an abomination when he sees one. I told Wyler, "This is what's going on underneath the scene-they seem to be talking about politics, but Messala is really trying to rekindle a love affair," and Wyler was startled. We discussed the matter, and then he sighed, "Well. Anything is better than what we've got in the way of motivation, but don't tell Chuck." I did tell Stephen Boud, who was fascinated. He agreed to play the frustrated lover. Study his face in the reaction shots in that scene, and you will see that he plays it like a man starving.

It was 1959, and the screen was on the verge of a new freedom. Vidal was saying that it made sense that the two men should be attracted to each other. Theirs was the most vibrant and interesting relationship in the film. Wyler later told Vidal, "The biggest mistake we made was the love story. If we had cut out that girl [Haya Harareet] altogether and concentrated on the two guys, everything would have gone better." Howard Hawks always concentrated on the guys, and in his films things went better- better than in Ben-Hur, at least. Dealing almost always with close, dependent, emotional male relationships, his films were informed with a particularly schizophrenic sensibility with regard to maleness and the intrusion of women into its world. His early feature Fig Leaves (1926) is typical of the kind of male celebration that saw women as mothers or mattresses and took great care to deny any feminine implication in the closeness of comrades.

In Red River (1948), Hawks' only use for Joanne Dru is to have her tell John Wayne and Montgomery Clift what we can already see. "Stop fighting!" she screams in the climactic scene. "You two know you love each other." Yet the nature of that love, despite the Clift screen persona's doing for the young Matthew what Garbo's did for Queen Christina, remained hidden. Probably the most homoerotic sequence in a Hawks film is the musical number "Is There Anyone Here for Love?" that Jane Russell performs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Russell is surrounded by muscular men in briefs who seem to be oblivious to her charms ("Doesn't anyone wanna play?") but are very interested in showing off their bodies to the choreography of Jack Cole.

The only acknowledgment of the homosexuality in buddy films has come from those critics who attribute the misogynist attitudes of such films to the covert gayness in them. When Joseph McBride and Gerald Peary, in an interview in Film Comment, questioned Hawks about "gay undertones" in his films, Red River in particular, Hawks told them it was " goddam silly statement to make." And although Glenn Ford remarked in an interview that he and George Macready "knew we were supposed to be playing homosexuals" in Gilda (1946), director Charles Vidor laughed, "Really? I didn't know those boys were supposed to be that way!"

Homosexuality as a viable option has been repressed both in the lives of men and in their work, and it is easy to see how directors could be blind to their own subtexts. The taboo against male intimacy is taken more seriously onscreen than it is in real life. Director Robert Aldrich, whose film The Choirboys (1977) deals extensively with the fear of homosexuality in its graphic portrayal of homophobia among the Los Angeles police, recognizes a traditional male reluctance to deal with such things.

What was not omitted from The Mechanic and films like it was the sexual dynamic, which caused such critics as Vincent Canby of the New York Times to recognize that something more than simple male bonding was involved. People say that there can be no such thing as a "gay sensibility" because the existence of one would mean that there is a straight sensibility, and clearly there is not. But a gay sensibility can be many things; it can be present even when there is no sign of homosexuality, open or covert, before or behind the camera. Gay sensibility is largely a product of oppression, of the necessity to hide so well for so long. It is a ghetto sensibility, born of the need to develop and use a second sight that will translate silently what the world sees and what the actuality may be. It was gay sensibility that, for example, often enabled some lesbians and gay men to see at very early ages, even before they knew the words for what they were, something on the screen that they knew related to their lives in some way, without being able to put a finger on it. Often it was the simple recognition of difference, the sudden understanding that something was altered or not what it should be, perhaps the role reversal of a Dietrich or a Garbo evoking a hidden truth about the nature of sexuality in general. Or it may have been the tone in James Dean's voice as he zipped up the jacket of the dead Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause and muttered, "Poor kid . .. he was always cold." It was the sense of longing that existed in such scenes, the unspoken, forbidden feelings that were always present, always denied. It said, this has something to do with your life, and it was a voice that could not be ignored, even though the pieces did not fall into place until years later.

With no "real" homosexuals allowed onscreen in the Forties and Fifties, censors often looked for hidden meanings. Sometimes they found them even when the real thing was abundantly clear. While on the lookout for overt references to stereotypical homosexuality, censors missed the ephemeral emotional commitments to the kind of male bonding that had characterized couples since Wings. In Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Farley Granger and John Dall are the pretentious homosexual lovers who on a whim murder a former prep school classmate, believing themselves of superior intellect and not morally responsible to a crass society. It was the inconsequential dialogue rather than the specific relationship that caught the censor's eye. Arthur Laurents recalls that when he finished his screenplay for Rope he left England for New York, and while he was in America, the script was passed on by American censors. "Rope came from an English play called Rope's End, " Laurents explains, "and while I was in New York, the producer Sidney Bernstein took a few passages from the play and put them back into the script. So when it came back from the Hays Office, every one of those passages was circled, with the comment "homosexual dialoque" written in the margin. And do you know what they were? It was simply that they were saying things like 'My dear boy' to each other, and the way the English talked was known as 'fruity over here."

There were other, more covert homosexual relationships in Hitchcock films, among them that of Martin Landau and James Mason in North by Northwest (1959) and, more striking, Robert Walker and Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train (1951). But the director seldom commented on such aspects of his work. "We never discussed, Hitch and I, whether the characters in Rope were homosexuals," Laurents says, "but I thought it was apparent."

I guess he did, too, but it never came up until we got to casting. We'd wanted Cary Grant for the teacher and Montgomery Clift for one of the boys, and they both turned it down for the same reason—their image. They felt they couldn't risk it. Eventually John Dall and Farley Granger played the boys, and they were very aware of what they were doing. Jimmy Stewart, however, who played the teacher, wasn't at all. And if you asked Hitchcock, he'd tell you it isn't there, knowing perfectly well that it is. He was interested in perverse sexuality of any kind, and he used it for dramatic tension. But being a strong Catholic, he probably thought it was wrong. The homosexuality between the two men, after all, in Strangers on a Train, isn't in the script, yet it's there. Farley Granger told me once that it was Robert Walker's idea to play Bruno Anthony as a homosexual.

Walker's choice was particularly exciting in terms of the plot. The tension it created between his malignantly fey Bruno and Granger's golly gee tennis player, Guy Haines, heightened the bizarre nature of their pact. Bruno would kill Guy's unwanted wife, and in exchange Guy would murder Bruno's hated father. Bruno's homosexuality emerged in terms that would be used increasingly throughout the Fifties to define gays as aliens. His coldness, his perverse imagination and an edge of elitist superiority made him an extension of the sophisti­cated but deadly sissy played by Clifton Webb in Laura, Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon and Martin Landau in North by Northwest. A Bruno Anthony is what Hitchcock might [...]

Philip and Brandon, the lovers in Rope, were warped individuals who murdered out of a belief in their own moral and intellectual superiority, which they believed placed them outside the law. By existing outside the culture, such gays were able to deny explicit homosexuality while at the same time reinforcing specific stereotypes. This is how Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray could reach the screen in 1945, shorn of its more bizarre sexual implications while offering George Sanders ("I choose all of my friends for their good looks") as a symbol of sophisticated decadence. Such ghettoized characters presaged the gay-as-alien images of the 1950s and had their roots in the same anti-intellectualism and mistrust of difference that had characterized the shaping of Hollywood's image of the normal American man. In Frank Capra and Robert Riskin's original script for It Happened One Night (1934), for example, the character eventually played by [...]

The view of the homosexual as being alien to his own society was also present in the constant deletion of specific homosexuality from the screen adaptations of literary works in the Forties. In 1945, Billy Wilder brought Charles Jackson's novel The Lost Weekend to the screen with Ray Milland as the alcoholic writer Don Birnam. In Jackson's novel, Birnam's alcoholism stems from a complex variety of reasons that includes a father fixation and a false accusation of his having had a homosexual relationship with a college fraternity brother. (Other Jackson books had had gay themes; a subplot in The Fall of Valor involved a marine and a married man.) In Wilder's version of The Lost Weekend, however, the motivation for Birnam's drinking became a simple case of writer's block. Seemingly a victim of the same problems that would later beset Tom Lee in Tea and Sympathy, Jackson's Don Birnam is also "saved" by the love of a good woman. But in the film, Jane Wyman saves Ray Milland from his alcoholism, not from the cause of it. Paramount studio boss Buddy DeSylva stated the reason for the script changes: "If the drunk isn't an extremely attractive fellow who, apart from being a drunk, could be a hell of a nice guy, the audiences won't go for it."

The secret signals and hidden signs of homosexuality in Hollywood features were the only frames of reference for most gays, who learned about themselves chiefly from movies that said that the whole world was heterosexual. The Mariposa Film Group's documentary Word Is Out (1977) shows that, as a result of this silence, most gays across America believed that they were the only ones in the world. Years later, Fireworks would help to pave the way for the legitimization of homosexual subject matter onscreen when Supreme Court decisions involving the film's exhibition pronounced it not obscene in spite of its homosexual material. But in the early and middle 1950s, the invisibility of homosexuality was enforced with an almost fanatical paranoia.

Pop psychoanalysis was rampant in the Forties and Fifties, and gays were increasingly being defined in psychiatric jargon both onscreen and off. Suddenly people began talking about dominant mothers and weak, passive fathers. The perversity of the outsider, the oddball or the alien screen character was very noticeable in an era of rigid conformity such as the 1950s. The equation between being different in any way and being homosexual was easy to see.

In Leo McCarey's My Son John (1952), Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes play the distraught parents of a young Communist agent (Robert Walker). When their suspicions about their son's activities are confirmed, it is an American tragedy. Suddenly they see their son as a shifty, unfamiliar "thing" with no respect for God or country, an unprincipled monster to whom it is impossible to relate as of old. The healthy family situation disappears. Walker's coldness, his superiority and his open contempt for his parents and their way of life conspire to create a perverse unnaturalness not unlike that of his sinister Bruno in Strangers on a Train. The parents' reaction on learning of their son's Communist activities is exactly the same as if they had discovered their child's homosex­uality.

In a 1950 New York Times story, Guy George Gabrielson, Republican National Committee chairman, asserted that "sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government in recent years are perhaps as dangerous as actual Commu­nists." By December of that year, 4,954 suspected homosexuals had been removed from employment in the federal goverment.