Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall
by Richard Barrios
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Description
Rapacious dykes, self-loathing closet cases, hustlers, ambiguous sophisticates, and sadomasochistic rich kids: most of what America thought it knew about gay people it learned at the movies. A fresh and revelatory look at sexuality in the Great Age of movie making, Screened Out shows how much gay and lesbian lives have shaped the Big Screen. Spanning popular American cinema from the 1900s until today, distinguished film historian Richard Barrios presents a rich, compulsively readable show more analysis of how Hollywood has used and depicted gays and the mixed signals it has given us: Marlene in a top hat, Cary Grant in a negligee, a pansy cowboy in The Dude Wrangler. Such iconoclastic images, Barrios argues, send powerful messages about tragedy and obsession, but also about freedom and compassion, even empowerment. Mining studio records, scripts, drafts (including cut scenes), censor notes, reviews, and recollections of viewers, Barrios paints our fullest picture yet of how gays and lesbians were portrayed by the dream factory, warning that we shouldn't congratulate ourselves quite so much on the progress movies - and the real world -- have made since Stonewall. Captivating, myth-breaking, and funny, Screened Out is for all film aficionados and for anyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and drawn strength and a sense of identity from what they saw on screen, no matter how fleeting or coded. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
This book charts the history of gay and lesbian characters and moments in Hollywood films from the beginning to 1970 or so; filling in the picture that The Celluloid Closet (both book and film) created, and attempts to show that some of the earlier glimpses in the 1930s and 1940s were at least occasionally more positive than those that 1960s and the gradual relaxation of the code and its eventual end brought into existence.
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1,630 works; 51 members
Queer History - Specialized
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Author Information
7 Works 199 Members
Richard Barrios worked in the music and film industries before turning to film history with the award-winning A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film and with Screened Out, which was the basis of a film series of Turner Classic Movies. He lectures extensively and appears frequently on television and in film and DVD documentaries. Born in show more the swamps of south Louisiana and a longtime resident of New York City, he now makes his home in western New Jersey, near Philadelphia. show less
Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 791.43653
- Canonical LCC
- PN1995.9.H55
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, LGBTQ+, Sexuality and Gender Studies, History
- DDC/MDS
- 791.43653 — Arts & recreation Recreation, sports, and performing arts Public performances Motion pictures, radio, television, podcasting Motion pictures Special aspects of films; film adaptations, film genres {class specific films in 791.437} Films dealing with humanity Human characteristics and activities
- LCC
- PN1995.9 .H55 — Language and Literature Literature (General) Literature (General) Drama Motion pictures
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 61
- Popularity
- 507,485
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.07)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
