Since the transition into the modern-day gay rights movement, homosexuality has appeared more frequently in American film and cinema.
One of the current movements in LGBTQ cinema is to ensure that LGBTQ actors are employed to play queer roles; roles that have been historically almost exclusively been portrayed by straight actors, complicating authentic representation for gay people among fictional characters.
Early films and productions
The first notable suggestion of homosexuality on film was in 1895, when two men were shown dancing together in the William Kennedy Dickson motion picture The Dickson Experimental Sound Film, commonly labeled online and in three published books as The Gay Brothers. At the time, the men were not seen as "queer" or even flamboyant, but merely as acting fancifully. However, film critic Parker Tyler stated that the scene "shocked audiences with its subversion of conventional male behavior". During the late 19th century and into the 1920s and 30s, homosexuality was largely depicted through gender-based conventions and stereotypes. Oftentimes male characters intended to be identified as gay were flamboyant, effeminate, humorous characters on film. The terms "pansy" and "sissy" became tagged to homosexuality and described "a flowery, fussy, effeminate soul given to limp wrists and mincing steps". Because of his high-pitched voice and attitude, the pansy easily transitioned from the silent film era to the talking pictures where those characteristics could be taken advantage of. Gay male characters were depicted as having stereotypically feminine jobs, such as a tailor, hairdresser, or choreographer; reinforcing the stereotype that gay men were limited to certain careers. Lesbian characters did not have a title like gay men, but were still associated with crossdressing, a deep voice, and having a stereotypically masculine job.
The first erotic kiss between two members of the same sex in a film was in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Marlene Dietrich was the first leading lady to kiss another female on screen in 1930's Morocco. During the period of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the cinema audience had significantly waned. Filmmakers produced movies with themes and images that had high shock value to prompt people to return to the theaters. This called for the inclusion of more controversial topics such as prostitution and violence, creating a demand for pansies and their lesbian counterparts to stimulate or shock audiences. With the new influx of these provocative subjects, debates arose regarding the negative effects these films could have on American society.
It was during this same time that the United States Supreme Court ruled in the 1915 case Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that films did not have First Amendment protection, due to the film industry being a business that could be easily used for "evil", and several local governments passed laws restricting the public exhibition of "indecent" or "immoral" films. The media publicity surrounding several high-profile celebrity scandals and the danger of church-led boycotts also pressured the leadership within the film industry to establish a national censorship board, which became the Motion Picture Production Code.
The Motion Picture Production Code, also simply known as the Production Code or as the "Hays Code", was established both to curtail additional government censorship and to prevent the loss of revenue from boycotts led by the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestant groups, who had wanted to judge the moral impact of Hollywood cinema on the general public. In terms of homosexuality, the code marked the end of the "pansy" characters and the beginning of depictions that were more reserved and buried within subtext. While the code did not explicitly state that depictions of homosexuality were against the code, the code barred the depiction of any kind of sexual perversion or deviance, which homosexuality fell under at the time. Gay characters on screen also came to be represented as villains or victims who commit crimes due to their homosexuality. Per the production code these homosexual villains would have to be punished by the law to coincide with the code's rule stating that films could not place crime above law. An example of the enforcement of the production code is the character Joel Cairo in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. In the original novel the character is clearly homosexual, though in the movie his homosexuality is made vague. The production code not only affected what was cut from movies containing homosexual characters, but also often removed them completely. The stage play The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman was released as a film in 1936 titled These Three directed by William Wyler. The stage play contained a storyline of two teachers being accused of having a lesbian affair, yet the film version created a heterosexual love triangle between two women and one man. Critics came to favor the production code as it allowed for unsavory behaviors to be eliminated from the public eye. Many critics stated that the film version of The Children's Hour was more enjoyable with the absence of the lesbian characters when compared to the original stage play.
Sean Griffin, author of Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out, said Disney's cartoon Ferdinand the Bull (1939) is "not necessarily gay, but it's definitely queer". The short film depicts a "sleepy eyed bull who doesn't conform to expectations of masculinity". Nico Lang of Harper's Bazaar said Disney's 1941 film The Reluctant Dragon "is extremely queer, even if it's not necessarily gay". He also noted the inclusion of a gay couple (two male antelopes) in Zootopia.
Early gender-role reversals The time period prior to the Hays code included gender role-reversal productions, most notably Charlie Chaplin's A Woman (1915), in which Chaplin dresses as a woman and plays with the affections of men. Films such as Miss Fatty (1915), featuring Fatty Arbuckle, and Sweedie (1914–16), starring Academy Award-winning actor Wallace Beery, created a comedic view of drag that audiences found entertaining. However, with the establishment of the Hollywood Production Code, drag depictions almost disappeared from mainstream commercial films. Various other notable drag films of the early to mid-20th century include: A Florida Enchantment (1914), directed by and starring Sidney Drew Mabel's Blunder (1914), directed by and starring Mabel Normand Charley's Aunt (1915), based on the stage play and starring Oliver Hardy Morocco (1930), starring Marlene Dietrich, in which she performs a song in tuxedo and kisses another woman Queen Christina (1933), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Greta Garbo Wonder Bar (1934), starring Al Jolson, features a brief, but explicit homosexual reference Sylvia Scarlett (1936), starring Katharine Hepburn, a widely unsuccessful film, but significant due to the female-to-male transformation I Was a Male War Bride (1949), directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant as a French officer who must impersonate a female war bride Glen or Glenda (1953), a film by Ed Wood starring himself Some Like It Hot (1959), featuring Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Lemmon
From 1950 to 1956 Jerry Lewis appeared in several film remakes in roles originally written for women. He appeared in drag in the films At War with the Army, Scared Stiff, and Money From Home and routinely adopted effeminate mannerisms and gender ambiguous role-playing with his partner Dean Martin. He was criticized by the press for his 'prancing and mincing' homosexual references.
World War II era to 1960s During the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, Hollywood increasingly depicted gay men and women as sadists, psychopaths, and nefarious, anti-social villains. These depictions were driven by the censorship of the code, which was willing to allow "sexual perversion" if it was depicted in a negative manner, as well as the fact that homosexuality was classified as a mental illness and gay men and women were often harassed by the police. This can be examined in Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope. In his article "The History of Gays and Lesbians on Film", author Daniel Mangin explains:
In the film, Jimmy Stewart plays a dabbler in philosophy who introduces the two boys to the "Superman" theory of the superiority of some humans over others. He becomes horrified when he realizes that the theories he espoused have led to murder. His character's somewhat hysterical repudiation of his formerly held beliefs mirrored the fears of some Americans about the infiltration of alien ideas. That the homosexuals in Rope were connected to the arts, as were many of those investigated, seems apt in view of longstanding suspicions about the politics and sexual practices of people so engaged.
The censorship code gradually became liberalized during the 1950s and 1960s, until it was replaced by the current classification system established by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968. Legally, it was the 1952 case Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson that extended First Amendment legal protection to films, reversing its original verdict, and, via a separate case in 1948, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., ended the once common practice of film studios owning the theaters. That practice had made it difficult for films produced outside of these studios, such as independent or international films, to be screened widely, let alone to be commercially successful.
Culturally, American consumers were increasingly less likely to boycott a film at the request of the Catholic Church or fundamentalist Protestant groups. This meant that films with objectionable content did not necessarily need the approval of the Hollywood Production Code or religious groups to be successful. As a result, Hollywood gradually became more willing to ignore the code to compete with television and the growing access to independent and international cinema.
During the 1950s–60s, gay characters in American films were identified with more overtly sexual innuendos and methods (e.g., a reference in The Seven Year Itch (1955) to two male tenants who are "interior decorators or something"), but having a gay or bisexual sexual orientation was largely treated as a trait of miserable and suicidal misfits who frequently killed themselves or other people.
During this post-war era, mainstream American cinema might have advocated tolerance for eccentric, sensitive young men wrongly accused of homosexuality, such as in the film adaptation of Tea and Sympathy (1956), but gay characters were frequently eliminated from the final cut of the film or depicted as dangerous misfits who would fall prey to a well-deserved violent end. Others had homosexual themes almost completely removed such as in the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which sees the plot surrounding Paul Newman's character of Brick coping with the death of his friend Skipper, a man he is alluded to having had feelings for, changed to themes of immaturity and grief of a friend. An early example of homoeroticism in American film was 1957's The Strange One.
The code was relaxed somewhat after 1961, and the next year William Wyler remade a more faithful adaptation of The Children's Hour with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. After MacLaine's character admits her love for Hepburn's, she hangs herself; this set a precedent for miserable endings in films addressing homosexuality. Advise & Consent (1962) depicted a married senator who is being blackmailed over a wartime homosexual affair, and was the first mainstream American movie to show a gay bar.