The Celluloid Closet  

There's two things got me puzzled
There's two things I just can't understand
That's a mannish actin' woman
And a skipping, twisting woman actin' man.

—"Foolish Man Blues" (1927) by Bessie Smith,

"Most of our pictures have little, if any, real substance. Our fear of what the censors will do keeps us from portraying life the way it really is. We wind up with a lot of empty fairy tales that do not have much relation to anyone."—Samuel Goldwyn, 1938

"The movies didn't always get history straight. But they told the dream."—Charlton Heston, narrating America on Film, 1976

Yeh, it's sad, believe me, Missy
When you're born to be a sissy
Without the vim and verve

--"If I Only Had the Nerve" (1939) in the film The Wizard of Oz

"This chapter is concerned primarily with the genesis of the sissy and not the tomboy because homosexual behavior onscreen, as almost every other defined "type" of behavior, has been cast in male terms. Homosexuality in the movies, whether overtly sexual or not, has always been seen in terms of what is or is not masculine. The defensive phrase "Who's a sissy?" has been as much a part of the American lexicon as "So's your old lady." After all, it is supposed to be an insult to call a man effeminate, for it means he is like a woman and therefore not as valuable as a "real" man. The popular definition of gayness is rooted in sexism. Weakness in men rather than strength in women has consistently been seen as the connection between sex role behavior and deviant sexuality. And while sissy men have always signaled a rank betrayal of the myth of male superiority, tomboy women have seemed to reinforce that myth and have often been indulged in acting it out."--The Celluloid Closet (1981) by Vito Russo

"Suddenly the "real" problem, the one that is never talked about in the film, becomes the ultimate culprit—because it seems to be the one subject that is so ostentatiously avoided. A review in Time said that audiences seeing The Strange One "will learn what goes on inside a sadist—mostly repressed homosexuality." But who is doing the repressing here? The author certainly made Jocko a sexually repressed character, but the sexuality that characters repress shows itself in their behavior in certain ways—ways that were then repressed by the censors."--The Celluloid Closet (1981) by Vito Russo

"A lesbian relationship involving another screen madam (Shelley Winters), in an adaptation of Jean Genet's The Balcony (1963), featured a kiss between Winters and her bookkeeper (Lee Grant) that earned the description a "lesbian letch" in Variety's review. In Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965), Brock Peters played an imperious, sadistic pimp who is clearly having an affair with a man (whom Newsday called his "white underling"). These combinations of newly visible losers thrown together in the sexual jungles of major cities did not demystify homosexuality; they only paid tribute to its mysterious, lowlife nature. What disappeared was the restriction on saying "it" out loud."--The Celluloid Closet (1981) by Vito Russo