The Celluloid Closet

Banned & Censored Cinema

The Celluloid Closet & Case Studies

Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, USA, 1996, 101 min.

The Celluloid Closet features excerpts of over 120 films in a groundbreaking expose of on screen gay men and lesbians, from cruel stereotypes to covert love to positive images of the 1990s. The film introduces the Hays Code, and discusses how Hollywood screenwriters and directors respond to its ban of explicit references to homosexuality. Inspired by Vito Russo's book The Celluloid Closet (1981).

Narrated by Lily Tomlin and with Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Curtis, Gore Vidal, and others.

Clips of these films will further illustrate the censorship of marginal sexuality in cinema: Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, Germany, 1931), The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), Rock Hudson Home Movies (Mark Rappaport)

In her book on women in film, From Reverence to Rape, Molly Haskell says that "the big lie" is that women are inferior. The big lie about lesbians and gay men is that we do not exist. The story of the ways in which gayness has been defined in American film is the story of the ways in which we have been defined in America. In Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Beverly Axelrod says, "Our tragedy does not derive from our fantasy of what homosexuals are but from our fantasy of what America is. We have made each other up." As expressed on screen, America was a dream that had no room for the existence of homosexuals. Laws were made against depicting such things on screen. And when the fact of our existence became unavoidable, we were reflected, on screen and off, as dirty secrets.

We have cooperated for a very long time in the maintenance of our own invisibility. And now the party is over. - Vito Russo, intro. to The Celluloid Closet

Of the three troubled teenagers in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), it is Sal Mineo's Plato who is the lonely, tormented sissy. Plato is the mama's boy, brought up by a smothering maid in the absence of his father. In his adoration of James Dean, he seeks a father more than a lover. But because Dean returns his feelings so blatantly, sparks fly. Dean's rebellious youth in crisis, a tender and courageous figure, is as loving toward Plato as he is toward Natlie Wood, and the three form a family relationship.
- Vito Russo

Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one example of a play cleansed of explicit homosexual content for its screen adaptation. Brick (Paul Newman): "Oh, you think so, too, you call me your son and a queer. Oh!...You think so, too? You think me an' Skipper did, did, did!--sodomy!--together?" "Queer" and "sodomy" are absent from the movie version of Cat.

Traditionally, gay actors in Hollywood - such as Rock Hudson - have had to maintain strict privacy about their offscreen sexual identities in order to safeguard their personas as (hetero) sex symbols.

Mädchen in Uniform (Germany, 1931), set in a Prussian girls school, tones down the overt lesbianism of the play by Christa Winsloe the movie is based on. Nevertheless, the feelings between student Manuela (Hertha Thiele) and teacher Fraulein von Bernbourg (Dorothea Wieck) are developed enough to have caused American censors to first condemn the film outright, and then accept a censored version that left lesbianism open to question.

[For the movie,] Steven Spielberg took a sexually explicit love affair in an existing work and, by his own admission, sanitized it into a series of chaste kisses to beg acceptance from a mass audience. "According to Steven," said Whoopi Goldberg, "middle America simply would not sit still for me on top and Shug on bottom, so we made it less explicit. This way we won't offend anyone."
- Vito Russo

"She say, I love you, Miss Celie. And then she haul off and kiss me on the mouth.

Um, she say, like she surprise. I kiss her back, say, um, too. Us kiss and kiss till us can't hardly kiss no more. Then us touch each other."
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple

REQUIRED READINGS & WEBSITES

• the Hays Office, "The Motion Picture Production Code", Gerald Gardner, The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship from the Hays Office, 1934 to 1968 (NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1987), course reader

• the Hays Office, "The Motion Picture Production Code", Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex: Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-34 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), course reader

• Thomas Doherty, "Queer Flashes", Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex: Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-34 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), course reader

• Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1987), pp. 56-58, 104-111, 278-280, course reader

• Alice Walker, The Color Purple (NY: Washington Square Press, 1982), pp. 108-109, course reader