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Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness
A blazingly original history celebrating the persistence of queerness onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the dark days of the Hollywood Production Code.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code severely restricted what Hollywood cinema could depict. This included “any inference” of the lives of homosexuals. In a landmark 1981 book, gay activist Vito Russo famously condemned Hollywood's censorship regime, lambasting many midcentury films as the bigoted products of a “celluloid closet.”
But there is more to these movies than meets the eye. In this insightful, wildly entertaining book, cinema historian Michael Koresky finds new meaning in “problematic” classics of the Code era like Hitchcock's Rope, Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy, and-bookending the period and anchoring Koresky's narrative-William Wyler's two adaptations of The Children's Hour, Lillian Hellman's provocative hit play about a pair of schoolteachers accused of lesbianism.
Lifting up the underappreciated queer filmmakers, writers, and actors of the era, Koresky finds artists who are long overdue for reevaluation. Through his brilliant analysis, Sick and Dirty reveals the “bad seeds” of queer cinema to be surprisingly, even gleefully subversive, reminding us, in an age of book bans and gag laws, that nothing makes queerness speak louder than its opponents' bids to silence it.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code severely restricted what Hollywood cinema could depict. This included “any inference” of the lives of homosexuals. In a landmark 1981 book, gay activist Vito Russo famously condemned Hollywood's censorship regime, lambasting many midcentury films as the bigoted products of a “celluloid closet.”
But there is more to these movies than meets the eye. In this insightful, wildly entertaining book, cinema historian Michael Koresky finds new meaning in “problematic” classics of the Code era like Hitchcock's Rope, Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy, and-bookending the period and anchoring Koresky's narrative-William Wyler's two adaptations of The Children's Hour, Lillian Hellman's provocative hit play about a pair of schoolteachers accused of lesbianism.
Lifting up the underappreciated queer filmmakers, writers, and actors of the era, Koresky finds artists who are long overdue for reevaluation. Through his brilliant analysis, Sick and Dirty reveals the “bad seeds” of queer cinema to be surprisingly, even gleefully subversive, reminding us, in an age of book bans and gag laws, that nothing makes queerness speak louder than its opponents' bids to silence it.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published June 3, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
March 13, 2025
A stunningly well-researched and thoughtful account of queerness during the Golden Age of Hollywood. And, overall, a hard book to read. Not because of the sheer volume of information, which while extensive is organized so well that I never found myself lost. It’s because of the feeling it left me with. When it comes to queerness—to its representation in media, its sociological standing—we’ve come so far, but we still have such a ways to go. There is still such a pervasive sense of “otherness” that is all at once ostracizing and a point of pride. I don’t know whether to feel hopeful or jaded. It’s something I’ll have to sit with.
June 7, 2025
Maybe I am just not as big of a film buff as I thought. Because it definitely detracted from the book for me if I hadn't seen the film that was being discussed in any given chapter. I appreciate how well researched and thought out the book was. But I am not afraid to admit some of it went over my head.
June 8, 2025
Wonderfully insightful overview of an equally fascinating and frustrating period of film history. The Children's Hour had such a profound effect on me when I saw it at a too young age, and Koresky definitely captures some of that in his own reflections.
June 24, 2025
A good, eloquently written book of film analysis & decontextualization, perfect to hit that June/Pride sweet spot for queer film fans of the classic Hollywood era. I especially liked how the author summed up how the art we consume almost literally becomes a part of our DNA:
"I saw that even the most seemingly fanciful of these movie fixations were not reflecting the contours of my experience but creating them (...) we're jigsaw puzzles of what we watch, hear, learn, love, and hate."
Good stuff here. Have already been spurred on to rewatch Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (very rewarding!) and figure it's time to finally see The Children's Hour.
"I saw that even the most seemingly fanciful of these movie fixations were not reflecting the contours of my experience but creating them (...) we're jigsaw puzzles of what we watch, hear, learn, love, and hate."
Good stuff here. Have already been spurred on to rewatch Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (very rewarding!) and figure it's time to finally see The Children's Hour.
June 23, 2025
actual rating: 4.5 stars
July 1, 2025
(review to come but)
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June 7, 2025Would have been better if it was an overview of queer cinema from the era as the cover and synopsis suggested OR a deeper look at the context, history, and afterlife of the various adaptations of Children's Hour, which took up nearly 1/3 of the book.
April 5, 2025
This review first appeared on my Substack newsletter, Omnivorous.
My thanks to NetGalley for a review copy of this great book!
If you know anything about me and this newsletter, you know that I adore classic Hollywood. I love watching it, I love reading about it, I love writing about and talking about it. You’ll also know that I am particularly enamored of anything having to do specifically with queerness in old Hollywood, which continues to be a fruitful site of research and writing. No matter how much we dig into the period, there’s always something more to see, some new way of understanding the ways in which classical Hollywood, for all of its avowed hostility to queer people, often proved remarkably amenable to evoking its specter.
Enter Sick and Dirty, the new book from noted film historian Michael Koresky. The book runs from roughly to the 1930s to the 1960s, documenting the many ways that queerness managed to manifest itself in Hollywood films of the period, whether as a structuring absence–as happened during the 1930s to the early 1950s–or more blatantly, as came to be the case the more that the Code became detached from broader American society. In Koresky’s capable hands we meet some of the most remarkable queer figures of classic Hollywood, from directors like Dorothy Arzner (one of the few women directors to have a notable career during the period) and George Cukor (whose sexuality was an open secret and who was known for his parties) to queer, or queer-adjacent, stars like Farley Granger and Judy Garland. In one way or another, these creative folks managed to imbue even the most conservative of film texts with an undeniable queer frisson.
There are some writers who have a knack for combining scholarly and historical rigor with accessibility, and I think it’s safe to say that Korseky is very much in the ranks of such talented film writers. He has a real knack for finding important details about the lives and work of his subjects, weaving together a fascinating tale that situates the films of classical Hollywood against the broader backdrop in which they were created. Obviously he draws our attention to what was going on in the US at large–including, notably the House Un-American Activities Committee and its action–but he also focuses in particular on the Production Code which, for most of its existence, mandated against the presence of homosexuality in the movies.
As Koresky notes, the Production Code–which came into effect in the early 1930s and exerted a stranglehold on the movie industry as a whole–was a remarkable institution. For much of its heyday it was the province of the notoriously prissy and fussy and domineering Joseph Breen, who didn’t pull any punches when it came to imposing his will on the studios and their output. Due to the fact that almost all of the studios needed the Production Code Administration’s seal in order to get mass release, it’s easy to see how Breen came to wield so much influence.
In some cases, as Korseky documents, the Code ensured that even stories that were about queerness in origin were ultimately turned into something else entirely. The first screen adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, for example, became the film These Three, in which the ruinous central secret is adultery rather than sublimated lesbian desire. Even more egregiously, Crossfire (released in 1947) was based on the novel The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks, went from being about militant homophobia to antisemitism. In both cases, however, the cultural awareness of the presence of queerness in the original text ensured that it became notable in the films precisely by its structuring absence.
Some authors and filmmakers, however, delighted in thwarting the PCA. Take, for example, the blazingly queer Suddenly, Last Summer, based on the play by Tennessee Williams (for my own take on that particular film, click here). At first glance it might seem like just the type of film that the PCA would forbid, and Koresky provides a fascinating and enjoyable chronicle of its path to the screen. As with so many other films produced under the Code, queerness becomes ever more noticeable by its very absence. Only a very obtuse viewer, or one that was quite willing to engage in the same kind of blindness and prudery as Breen, would find themselves unable to see and sense and hear the queerness in a film like Suddenly, Last Summer (the same is true of many of the other film adaptations of Williams’ work, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).
As the 1950s bled into the 1960s, however, it became harder and harder to enforce the Code, meaning that studios and directors were able to show more and more queerness. Even with the relaxation, though, it was still more often for queer folks to meet tragic endings–as Shirley MacLaine’s Martha Dobie does in The Children’s Hour–or for queerness to be a trembling but ephemeral presence, as in Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy. Even as American culture more broadly came into contact with queerness in the arts, Hollywood continued to drag its feet.
Even so, the queer figures in these films tantalize and beguile us, whether as murderous monsters as in Rope or as doomed heroines as in The Children’s Hour. The power of a book like Sick and Dirty lies in its ability to deeply excavate the painful and conflicted histories of queerness in Hollywood. As Koresky repeatedly reminds us, it’s far too simplistic to dismiss these films as relics of an earlier period. Instead, their importance stems in no small part from the fact that we can still feel their pull and their allure. They may be “problematic,” and they may represent an age of repression, but queerness still has a power that even the PCA and its zealots could never entirely eradicate. If anything, their very attempts to repress it merely gave it that much more potency.
Korseky ends by arguing that these films still have much to teach us, even in an age in which queerness in the cinema has become rather banal and accepted (though this could well change now that Trump and the anti-queer right is in the ascendant). Indeed, I very much appreciated the way that he frequently drew on his experience teaching them to show how films like Tea and Sympathy, with its story about a young man lost in a soup of toxic masculinity and trying to find his way, continue to resonate with today’s similarly lost youth. Though it’s been quite a while now since I taught in a college classroom, I do remember the joy I felt at seeing my students experience such gems as All About Eve and All That Heaven Allows for the first time, and it’s good to see that this continues.
If I have a complaint about this book, it’s that it does belabor the point a bit when it comes to The Children’s Hour and its various adaptations. Obviously it is a very important film, and it’s one that has clearly shaped the way that Koresky engages with queer cinema from old Hollywood, but his engagement with it does tend to overshadow some of the other films with which he engages.
Aside from this small nitpick, I found Sick and Dirty to be a worthwhile addition to the existing scholarship on queerness in old Hollywood, and I appreciate Korseky’s engagement with some of the major figures in feminist and queer film theory and history. For all that the powers-that-be attempted to expunge all sorts of “perversion” from the world of the moving image, the presence of the films discussed in this book put the lie to their power. Queerness, then as now, is a force that can never totally be eradicated.
My thanks to NetGalley for a review copy of this great book!
If you know anything about me and this newsletter, you know that I adore classic Hollywood. I love watching it, I love reading about it, I love writing about and talking about it. You’ll also know that I am particularly enamored of anything having to do specifically with queerness in old Hollywood, which continues to be a fruitful site of research and writing. No matter how much we dig into the period, there’s always something more to see, some new way of understanding the ways in which classical Hollywood, for all of its avowed hostility to queer people, often proved remarkably amenable to evoking its specter.
Enter Sick and Dirty, the new book from noted film historian Michael Koresky. The book runs from roughly to the 1930s to the 1960s, documenting the many ways that queerness managed to manifest itself in Hollywood films of the period, whether as a structuring absence–as happened during the 1930s to the early 1950s–or more blatantly, as came to be the case the more that the Code became detached from broader American society. In Koresky’s capable hands we meet some of the most remarkable queer figures of classic Hollywood, from directors like Dorothy Arzner (one of the few women directors to have a notable career during the period) and George Cukor (whose sexuality was an open secret and who was known for his parties) to queer, or queer-adjacent, stars like Farley Granger and Judy Garland. In one way or another, these creative folks managed to imbue even the most conservative of film texts with an undeniable queer frisson.
There are some writers who have a knack for combining scholarly and historical rigor with accessibility, and I think it’s safe to say that Korseky is very much in the ranks of such talented film writers. He has a real knack for finding important details about the lives and work of his subjects, weaving together a fascinating tale that situates the films of classical Hollywood against the broader backdrop in which they were created. Obviously he draws our attention to what was going on in the US at large–including, notably the House Un-American Activities Committee and its action–but he also focuses in particular on the Production Code which, for most of its existence, mandated against the presence of homosexuality in the movies.
As Koresky notes, the Production Code–which came into effect in the early 1930s and exerted a stranglehold on the movie industry as a whole–was a remarkable institution. For much of its heyday it was the province of the notoriously prissy and fussy and domineering Joseph Breen, who didn’t pull any punches when it came to imposing his will on the studios and their output. Due to the fact that almost all of the studios needed the Production Code Administration’s seal in order to get mass release, it’s easy to see how Breen came to wield so much influence.
In some cases, as Korseky documents, the Code ensured that even stories that were about queerness in origin were ultimately turned into something else entirely. The first screen adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, for example, became the film These Three, in which the ruinous central secret is adultery rather than sublimated lesbian desire. Even more egregiously, Crossfire (released in 1947) was based on the novel The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks, went from being about militant homophobia to antisemitism. In both cases, however, the cultural awareness of the presence of queerness in the original text ensured that it became notable in the films precisely by its structuring absence.
Some authors and filmmakers, however, delighted in thwarting the PCA. Take, for example, the blazingly queer Suddenly, Last Summer, based on the play by Tennessee Williams (for my own take on that particular film, click here). At first glance it might seem like just the type of film that the PCA would forbid, and Koresky provides a fascinating and enjoyable chronicle of its path to the screen. As with so many other films produced under the Code, queerness becomes ever more noticeable by its very absence. Only a very obtuse viewer, or one that was quite willing to engage in the same kind of blindness and prudery as Breen, would find themselves unable to see and sense and hear the queerness in a film like Suddenly, Last Summer (the same is true of many of the other film adaptations of Williams’ work, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).
As the 1950s bled into the 1960s, however, it became harder and harder to enforce the Code, meaning that studios and directors were able to show more and more queerness. Even with the relaxation, though, it was still more often for queer folks to meet tragic endings–as Shirley MacLaine’s Martha Dobie does in The Children’s Hour–or for queerness to be a trembling but ephemeral presence, as in Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy. Even as American culture more broadly came into contact with queerness in the arts, Hollywood continued to drag its feet.
Even so, the queer figures in these films tantalize and beguile us, whether as murderous monsters as in Rope or as doomed heroines as in The Children’s Hour. The power of a book like Sick and Dirty lies in its ability to deeply excavate the painful and conflicted histories of queerness in Hollywood. As Koresky repeatedly reminds us, it’s far too simplistic to dismiss these films as relics of an earlier period. Instead, their importance stems in no small part from the fact that we can still feel their pull and their allure. They may be “problematic,” and they may represent an age of repression, but queerness still has a power that even the PCA and its zealots could never entirely eradicate. If anything, their very attempts to repress it merely gave it that much more potency.
Korseky ends by arguing that these films still have much to teach us, even in an age in which queerness in the cinema has become rather banal and accepted (though this could well change now that Trump and the anti-queer right is in the ascendant). Indeed, I very much appreciated the way that he frequently drew on his experience teaching them to show how films like Tea and Sympathy, with its story about a young man lost in a soup of toxic masculinity and trying to find his way, continue to resonate with today’s similarly lost youth. Though it’s been quite a while now since I taught in a college classroom, I do remember the joy I felt at seeing my students experience such gems as All About Eve and All That Heaven Allows for the first time, and it’s good to see that this continues.
If I have a complaint about this book, it’s that it does belabor the point a bit when it comes to The Children’s Hour and its various adaptations. Obviously it is a very important film, and it’s one that has clearly shaped the way that Koresky engages with queer cinema from old Hollywood, but his engagement with it does tend to overshadow some of the other films with which he engages.
Aside from this small nitpick, I found Sick and Dirty to be a worthwhile addition to the existing scholarship on queerness in old Hollywood, and I appreciate Korseky’s engagement with some of the major figures in feminist and queer film theory and history. For all that the powers-that-be attempted to expunge all sorts of “perversion” from the world of the moving image, the presence of the films discussed in this book put the lie to their power. Queerness, then as now, is a force that can never totally be eradicated.
June 28, 2025
Sick and Dirty is DENSE in both context and information and I found the pace incredibly slow. I struggled through the writing, which is elaborate and academic and not always interesting, and found it difficult to take in the sheer amount of facts and information. I love love love the subject matter and thesis and the author’s knowledge and compassion about film and queer representation is evident. I did appreciate the movies noted and examined (majority of which I’ve never even heard of, so the book provided additional materials for me to consume) and feel like I do have a better understanding of the navigation of queer themes, histories, and stories during the golden age. Though, I feel the book’s promise of a deeper understanding of (the) “making of modern queerness” is less fulfilled in the film highlighted and more in the sidenotes of queer historians, and that reality feels like two separate narratives.
June 28, 2025
Sick and Dirty was a lot more academic than I expected going in—definitely one I’ll need to revisit. It’s incredibly well-researched and thorough, and if you're looking for something that reads like a deep-dive research paper in book form, with thought provoking statements, this is exactly that.
That said, it was a bit hard to stay engaged throughout. While the message is clear and the arguments are solid, I felt like it was missing some human connection or narrative flow to break up the heavy analysis. Still, I really respect the work that went into this and think it's a valuable read for anyone studying film or media seriously or how a marginalized group has been effected by Hollywood (kind of like Katie Gee Salisbury's Not Your China Doll does for Chinese community around the same time period).
That said, it was a bit hard to stay engaged throughout. While the message is clear and the arguments are solid, I felt like it was missing some human connection or narrative flow to break up the heavy analysis. Still, I really respect the work that went into this and think it's a valuable read for anyone studying film or media seriously or how a marginalized group has been effected by Hollywood (kind of like Katie Gee Salisbury's Not Your China Doll does for Chinese community around the same time period).
May 21, 2025
Extremely well written book about how early Hollywood dealt with queerness in film, focusing in on films that were produced during the early Production Code era (and bookending it with the two adaptations of the Children's Hour), and how they manage to thread the line of having things to say about queerness and its perception during that time, and how producers spun certain elements to amp or deaden certain queer connotations. Fascinating reexamination of these films and behind the scenes elements. Definitely worth your time this summer.
June 25, 2025
I have to put this on my “skimmed” shelf as I was only listening with half an ear, but I’m impressed with the research done and have several movies I have to check out. More was dedicated to Hellman that I anticipated, and I wonder what I might be missing out on because of that focus. The audiobook narrator brings an engaging spirit to their reading, but there were several mispronunciations that threw me out of the narrative.
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June 28, 2025In the tiny town where I grew up, they would swap out one of the daytime channels with American Movie Classics at night. So I had seen a lot of these movies, some of them multiple times. (There wasn’t a lot to do, and my sister and I loved old movies.) But boy did I miss a lot of their meaning! I thoroughly enjoyed this book, especially the parts that delved into the ways the movie scripts changed in response to different levels of censorship.
June 30, 2025
Reading this has added so many films to my to-watch list! Thoughtful and well written, it was definitely a dense academic work but I don't think it detracted from the emotional impact. I especially liked the sentiment form the author that we are all made up of the things we watch and read and listen to. A must read for queer film lovers who like a deep dive sort of read.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
May 19, 2025
Interesting analysis. A bit long.
June 24, 2025
3.5 stars. This is a book with long paragraphs. Overall, there were more interesting chapters than uninteresting ones, but it's pretty academic.
June 25, 2025
Read for a 카지노싸이트 challenge. Interesting and enlightening.
July 1, 2025
3.5 ⭐️
I feel like after a few pages, the same point was being made over and over and over. It was a good point, so 3.5 ⭐️
I feel like after a few pages, the same point was being made over and over and over. It was a good point, so 3.5 ⭐️
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