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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Duralde, Alonso, author.

Title: Hollywood pride : a celebration of LGBTQ+ representation and perseverance in film / Alonso Duralde.

Description: First edition. | Philadelphia : Running Press, 2024. | Includes index. | Summary: “Just in time for Pride Month, this book is a first-of-its-kind in-depth exploration of LGBTQ+ representation from the dawn of cinema through today, from noted film critic Alonso Duralde and Turner Classic Movies”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023036824 (print) | LCCN 2023036825 (ebook) | ISBN 9780762485895 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780762485901 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Homosexuality in motion pictures. | Sexual minorities in motion pictures. | Motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—History. | Motion pictures—United States—History.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H55 D8725 2024 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.H55 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/653—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036824

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036825

ISBNs: 978-0-7624-8589-5 (hardcover), 978-0-7624-8590-1 (ebook)

E3-20250930-JV-PC-COR

For Pilar Ampuero Duralde and Dave White, whom I could almost always talk into watching a movie

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Introduction

One of the first innovations in cinematic narrative was crosscutting, which linked two simultaneous actions taking place in different locations. (For example: The cowboy rides across the plain; meanwhile bandits are blowing up the dam.)

Imagine, then, the crosscutting between two significant moments in cultural history: In late 1894 or early 1895, two male employees of the Edison Company danced together, one man’s hand holding the other’s elbow as their other hands moved around each other’s waists. A third man played the violin as they danced. A camera recorded the action as a wax cylinder captured the sound. The Dickson Experimental Sound Film was one of the very first movies ever shot and an early attempt to synchronize sound with motion pictures.

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a young assistant in the Edison laboratory, mounted the experiment (and played the violin). The dancers’ identities are lost to history, and there’s no indication that they were romantically involved. Nonetheless, one of the very first films ever shot involves two men locked in an embrace. It’s an image powerful enough to bookend the landmark documentary on LGBTQ+ cinema, 1995’s The Celluloid Closet.

Meanwhile…

Across the Atlantic Ocean, 1895 was also the year when Oscar Wilde stood trial in London for “gross indecency” and was found guilty. The verdict—and Wilde’s subsequent fall from grace and societal acceptance—underscored what was already apparent in Western society: There could be no tolerance for or acceptance of anyone who dared not conform to Judeo-Christian norms of sexuality or gender expression.

It was against this backdrop that cinema itself was being born, so it is no surprise, then, that so much of the history of LGBTQ+ artists in the film industry has been a hidden one. To exist in the world, let alone to exist in the public eye, meant that queer artists had to conceal their true selves from employers, the media, and their fans. This silence often extended after death, with family members and biographers committed to erasing what was deemed a shameful secret.

The major and most interesting part of film history is gossip: Who was almost in which film? Which film would have gotten made if only so-and-so had been in it? And especially—who slept with whom? Film history is a very, very long gossip column. And in the film world, everyone is just a wedding ring or a bed away, often less, from everyone else.

—From the Journals of Jean Seberg, written and directed by Mark Rappaport

If oral history is the history of those denied control of the printed record, gossip is the history of those who cannot even speak in their own first-person voice.

—B. Ruby Rich

To be fair, it is only recently that careers and lives are no longer necessarily ruined when people stand up and say, “This is who I am.” (Or when unscrupulous journalists write, “This is who you are.”) To say, in the twenty-first century, that this star or that director was part of the LGBTQ+ community is not to defame or to slander or to dismiss them; it is to acknowledge the complicated truth of an artist’s life and to include that artist in the historical record of LGBTQ+ people who have always existed and whose gifts have benefited society at large, even when society at large responded to queer people with hate and distrust.

Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that. No. Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through the City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?

—Roy Cohn, Angels in America, written by Tony Kushner

An exhaustive history of LGBTQ+ Hollywood may, in fact, be an impossible task: Between the people who understood (and strategically hid) their queer sexuality and the twentieth century’s changing terminologies and personal philosophies—there are generations of women who loved and nurtured other women but would never think of themselves as “lesbians,” and men who did and do exclusively enjoy sex with men without ever using gay as a descriptor—we can only surmise and attempt to translate coded language or gesture. Lifelong bachelorhood does not automatically imply an LGBTQ+ identity, and marriage and children do not automatically preclude one. In these pages, I hope to pay tribute to artists whose contributions on both sides of the camera have been essential to cinema history while also spotlighting films that have told queer stories and/or had special resonance to queer audiences.

Writing gay histories requires a reevaluation of traditional rules of “evidence.” Learning to read between the lines without reading into them is an acquired skill, as is learning to discern the truth as much by what isn’t said as what is… Researching gay history also requires weighing the vast body of gossip, film lore, and legend—too often high-handedly dismissed without even cursory consideration by writers consumed by their own seriousness.

—William J. Mann

If I’ve left out any of your favorite films or artists, please forgive me; since the dawn of the film industry, Hollywood has been a magnet for LGBTQ+ people everywhere to ply their trade and to live in relative peace of mind that they perhaps could not have found in their hometowns. Particularly as we get to 1990 and beyond, it is impossible to list every single queer member of the film industry or every single queer film produced. There are simply too many to count, and that’s a good thing. And if you encounter a beloved star in these pages whom you’ve never thought of as LGBTQ+ before, I hope the information only deepens and enhances your fandom.

(Incidentally, the terms LGBTQ+—which stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning,” with the plus sign accommodating ever-evolving identities and communities—and queer will appear throughout this book, somewhat interchangeably; these are terms that evolved, and continue to evolve, from the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, and their use does not imply that they were part of the language of many of the decades covered here. They are, however, the terminology of the time of this book’s publication; apologies to readers of the future if they have become outmoded, as very frequently with this community, descriptors can become slurs and vice versa.)

As I write these words in the summer of 2023, the LGBTQ+ community faces a new wave of attacks on our very right to exist. This is a story that’s never “over,” but as we continue to face new challenges, it’s always important to remember the people and events in history that got us to the place we are now.

CHAPTER ONE

FIRST FLICKERS

The Edison employee behind the Dickson Experimental Sound Film, was a busy man in the 1890s; in addition to directing and playing violin for this breakthrough piece of film (and of LGBTQ+ cinema), W. K. L. Dickson also created the first motion-picture studio in 1893, a small room measuring twenty-five by thirty feet. It would soon come into regular use; the first kinetoscope parlor in the United States opened in 1894 on Broadway in New York City.

Inside this converted shoe store, patrons could avail themselves of five Edison peep-show viewers that allowed them to watch fifty-foot shorts produced by Edison’s company. (Prices began at ten cents per film, dropping to five cents once the novelty wore off; this was at a time when a skilled worker’s average hourly wage was twenty-five cents.) The shorts generally captured brief bits of performance from the world of vaudeville and circuses; comedy and dance were the most popular, although the very first short produced by Edison was footage of employee Fred Ott sneezing.

Over the next few decades, movies would evolve, from the Lumière Brothers and George Méliès developing editing and special effects to Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 groundbreaking The Great Train Robbery and the 1914 Italian epic Cabiria, which is thought by many scholars to be the first feature film. Exhibition evolved as well, with nickelodeons giving way to films screened in vaudeville theaters and then, starting in the 1910s, in glittering movie palaces built exclusively for the presentation of motion pictures.

As the cinema was finding its footing—and eventually learning to talk—early pioneers in the study of human sexuality were initiating public discussions on the nature, and naturalness, of homosexual attraction. German psychiatrist Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis was translated and published in the United States in 1892. The following year, noted German activist Magnus Hirschfeld—founder of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee of Berlin, an early group that argued for gay rights—visited the United States for the first time, where Hearst newspapers applauded him as “the Einstein of sex.” A few years later, in 1900, British physician and social reformer Havelock Ellis published the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, subtitled Sexual Inversion. By the early twentieth century, the word homosexual was being used to describe a category of people (although some scientists were trying to get the word Uranian to stick).

In US society, Victorian standards of behavior and courtship remained very much the order of the day. This segregation between men and women led to intense relationships—some platonic, some not—between people of the same gender. It also meant that women whose interests and ambitions lay beyond the duties of home and family would often cut their hair and dress as men. Sometimes this change in appearance would define these people, by twenty-first-century standards, as trans men, but some were (again, by contemporary standards) butch lesbians, while others simply saw themselves as something other than wife, mother, or schoolteacher.

LGBTQ+ people remained fairly occluded from the culture at large at this point in history, but they weren’t entirely invisible. In fact, this period doesn’t get enough credit for laying the groundwork for more visible movements in the decades to follow: The first US gay-rights organization, for example, was the Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 in Chicago. Decades before lesbian singer-songwriters launched the Women’s Music movement, blues singer Bessie Smith and others were performing explicitly queer songs of love and heartache. And while the post–World War II years saw a great influx of LGBTQ+ people settling in urban areas (rather than their rural birthplaces) after surviving the global conflict, a smaller but no less significant version of that migration took place after World War I.

The early years of the cinema represent massive and relatively quick evolution, from the peep shows of the 1890s to the all-talking, all-singing extravaganzas that were the norm by 1930. And if the idea of queer visibility, on and off the screen, was somewhat slower to get rolling, LGBTQ+ people were by no means absent from this new medium.

THE FILMS

Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894–1895)

W. K. L. Dickson playing the violin into a recording device as two Edison employees dance to the music.

The “experimental” part of this film wasn’t the presentation of two men dancing together; it was Edison’s attempt to create the “kinetophone,” a marriage of the kinetograph (considered to be the first motion-picture camera) and the phonograph (still a relatively new invention, having emerged from the Edison labs in 1877). The experiment took place some three decades before The Jazz Singer would fully revolutionize the talking picture.

Syncing up the music with dancing would prove to be a challenge for archivists a century later: Legendary editor Walter Murch (whose vast credits include Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The English Patient, and the restoration of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil) was commissioned by the Library of Congress in 2000 to match the seventeen-second fragment of film with a cracked cylinder that featured a few minutes’ worth of music.

“It was very moving when the sound finally fell into sync,” Murch wrote. “The scratchiness of the image and the sound dissolved away, and you felt the immediate presence of these young men playing around with a fast-emerging technology.”

A Florida Enchantment (1914)

Written by Eugene Mullen, based on the play by Archibald Gunter. Directed by Sidney Drew.

This very silly farce from the dawn of cinema contains at least some nuggets of truth about gender and sexuality. Adapted from a stage comedy, it follows heiress Lillian Travers (Edith Storey) who finds a bottle of seeds that, when ingested, cause a person to change gender. She takes one and becomes a man, whose wooing of the local ladies simultaneously causes an uproar and intrigues the populace. When Lillian’s friend Dr. Cassadene (Drew) ingests a seed and becomes an aggressive woman, the outraged men form a posse and chase her off a pier.

While Gunter’s original intent was to demonstrate that men have an easier time making their way through society than women do, film historian Vito Russo points out in his landmark book The Celluloid Closet that “The apparently higher tolerance for ‘mannish’ women was deceptive… Rendering the idea of actual lesbianism all but invisible, the identification of such women in exclusively male terms served only to reinforce the idea that sexuality is the proper domain of men. Sissy men, after all, were never the objects of fascination bred in audiences by their female counterparts.”

Reviews at the time were mixed. Motography magazine praised its “large and competent cast in which Edith Story [sic] easily takes the stellar honors,” while Variety harrumphed, “Five reels wasted.” A Florida Enchantment lives on as an early attempt to explore gender roles and gender performance in society; it’s also the movie being researched by the insecure film-critic protagonist of Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 novel Antkind.

Different from the Others (1919)

Written by Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Directed by Richard Oswald.

Considered to be the very first feature film about LGBTQ+ people, this drama—co-written by pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—is a product of the interest in and understanding of queer lives that marked Germany’s Weimar period between the world wars. As such, the Nazis later attempted to destroy every copy as they eliminated nearly all traces of Hirschfeld’s research and archive. But a surviving forty-two-minute fragment provided contemporary archivists at the Outfest/UCLA Legacy Project with a starting point from which to create a restoration.

The plot deals with distinguished violinist Paul Körner (played by Conrad Veidt), and how his relationship with one of his male students, Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz), leads to scandal. In the same way that the British film Victim would, decades later, demonstrate how UK laws against homosexuality served only to make queer people the victims of blackmail, Different from the Others sought to demonstrate similar inequities imposed by Germany’s Paragraph 175, which outlawed sexual relations between men.

Blackmailer Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel, left) first meets protagonist Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt, right) at a gay ball.

The film’s content—the lost footage includes a lecture by Hirschfeld and a cameo by Oscar Wilde—and themes caused riots at some screenings, and it was banned outright in 1920. But even with just a portion remaining, it’s clear that Different from the Others was an LGBTQ+ film from well before such a genre even existed. As Jan-Christopher Horak of the UCLA Film & Television Archive noted, “The view of the film is at least fifty years ahead of its time. It takes the view that homosexuality isn’t a sickness or a pathology; it’s in fact just another expression of human sexuality. It’s the kind of enlightened theory that you wouldn’t see in this country probably until the ’70s or ’80s.”

Salomé (1922)

Written by Alla Nazimova; story by Natacha Rambova, based on the play by Oscar Wilde. Directed by Alla Nazimova (but credited to her common-law husband, Charles Bryant).

Sometimes called the first American art film, this eye-popping biblical saga owes less to its ostensible source material, the play by Oscar Wilde, and more to Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of Wilde’s text. A wildly ambitious effort from Alla Nazimova, this ambitious feature never achieved box-office success. When the film flopped financially, it ended Nazimova’s career as a producer, but Salomé is now considered an early essential work of avant-garde cinema.

Nazimova was in her forties, but nonetheless took on the role of the titular teenage temptress, dancing for King Herod (Mitchell Lewis) and demanding the head of John the Baptist (Nigel De Brulier). The results are like nothing else you’ve ever seen, between the baroque sets and props—including a string of giant pearls—and the strapping palace guards, all of which play like a dress rehearsal for the next century of camp iconography.

Critic J. Hoberman wrote, “It’s set in a world of total artifice… The bare-chested boys, blond Nubian slaves, metallic potted palms, art-nouveau floral patterns, and birdcage dungeons of Natacha Rambova’s design anticipate everything from Jean Cocteau and Josef von Sternberg to Flash Gordon, although Nazimova’s hairdo is unique.” One imagines a young Kenneth Anger furiously taking notes.

Part of the legend of the film revolves around whether or not the entire cast was gay; as with much of twentieth-century film scholarship regarding LGBTQ+ topics, it comes down to whom you ask.

Pandora’s Box (1929)

Written by G. W. Pabst and Ladislaus Vajda, based on the plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora by Frank Wedekind. Directed by G. W. Pabst.

Pandora’s Box is one of the great silent films, as well as one of two German movies that turned expat American actor Louise Brooks into a Jazz Age screen icon (the other being Diary of a Lost Girl). In an era of over-the-top vamps, Brooks’s portrayals were more credibly sexual, if no less voracious, than that of the other bad girls of the era.

While Brooks herself was sexually flexible—in later years, she spoke openly about her one-night stand with Greta Garbo—the movie’s major claim to fame as a queer classic is its presentation of what is thought to be the screen’s first lesbian character: Countess Geschwitz, played by Belgian actor Alice Roberts. Geschwitz performs a memorable tango with Brooks’s Lulu—at Lulu’s wedding, no less—and later sacrifices herself to a heterosexual blackmail plot for Lulu’s financial benefit.

The film suffered a literal death of a thousand cuts from censors in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with Geschwitz’s sexuality obliterated and the character turned into Lulu’s friend from childhood. More shockingly, Lulu’s murder at the hands of Jack the Ripper was removed entirely and replaced with a climactic religious conversion, with Lulu running off and joining the Salvation Army.

The Countess Geschwitz (Alice Roberts) shares a dance with Lulu (Louise Brooks) at Lulu’s wedding to Dr. Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner).

It wasn’t until film scholars in the 1950s uncovered Pabst’s original version that the film received its due as a stunning work of silent cinema. And with the character of Geschwitz fully restored, Pandora’s Box became a pioneering LGBTQ+ film.

SILENT COMICS IN DRAG

Early comedy shorts didn’t have a lot of time for setup; they had to be direct and to the point. (Not for nothing, we have the movies to thank for the expression, “Cut to the chase.”) And in the silent era, such films were obviously more reliant on visual and physical gags than verbal wit. So what better way to get turn-of-the-century audiences laughing than to take a familiar male comedian and stick him in a dress?

These films aren’t deep commentaries on gender and its expression, but because straight, male comedians cross-dressing was such a popular phenomenon, it deserves a mention.

The Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken (1901)

Writer uncredited. Directed by George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter.

Vaudevillian Gilbert Sarony plays the title role; the joke here is that she’s so hideous that she breaks all the equipment in the photographer’s studio with her ugly face. Sarony also plays a woman in Siegmund Lubin’s Meet Me at the Fountain.

The Leading Lady (1911)

Written by Allen Johnston. Directed by Ned Finley.

John Bunny stars as Bridget O’Flynn, an Irish cook recruited to star in a play about an Irish washerwoman. Her practical, working-class ways clash with those of the theatrical people.

Sweedie the Swatter (1914)

Essanay Studios—Writer and Director unknown.

Gruff, stocky Wallace Beery cross-dressed to play incompetent Swedish maid Sweedie in this film, which spawned multiple sequels—twenty-nine in total between 1914 and 1916—and established Beery’s reputation as a rising film star. (Other films in the series include Topsy-Turvy Sweedie, Sweedie and the Hypnotist, Sweedie in Vaudeville, and Golf Champion “Chick” Evans Links with Sweedie.) Beery went on to deliver non-drag performances in such classics as Min and Bill, The Champ (1931—for which he won an Academy Award), Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, and Viva Villa!

Spit-Ball Sadie (1915)

Written by Tad Dorgan. Directed by Hal Roach.

Harold Lloyd dresses up as the titular renowned baseball pitcher after he is unable to deliver her as a player to his girlfriend’s all-female team.

Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers (1915)

Writer uncredited. Directed by Fatty Arbuckle.

The plus-sized Arbuckle dons drag—and a bathing costume, no less—as the daughter of a “mothball magnate” who attracts the attention of several would-be suitors, including one played by Harold Lloyd. “Miss Fatty” returned in Coney Island.

A Woman (1915)

Written and directed by Charles Chaplin.

When a young man (Chaplin) can’t see his beloved because her father forbids it, he dresses as a woman and gets close to her by pretending to be “Nora Nettlerash.” Complications, naturally, ensue. Chaplin also notably performs without his famous mustache.

Other Films of Note

Algie, The Miner (1912): Pioneering female filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché co-directed this tale of a “sissy” turned cowboy that hit screens nearly a century before Brokeback Mountain.

The Soilers (1923): Stan Laurel appears without Oliver Hardy in this comedy short about a gold-rush prospector and a corrupt sheriff. A flamboyant cowboy swishes through the action and later blows a kiss at Stan. When he is rebuffed, he drops a potted petunia on Stan’s head.

Michael (1924): This tale of a painter and his male model—and the woman who comes between them—is another Weimar-era LGBTQ+ classic, from legendary Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr), who co-wrote the script with Thea von Harbou (Metropolis).

A Wanderer of the West (1927): In this silent Western, the flamboyant character of Clarence (Al Rogers) is introduced via intertitle as “one of nature’s mistakes, in a country where men were men.”

Wings (1927): The first Oscar-winner for Best Picture isn’t queer per se, but it offers a glimpse into accepted modes of masculinity—the flyboy heroes of this World War I movie aren’t afraid to hug and kiss each other, or to cry on each other’s shoulders, expressing a tenderness toward each other that would become verboten for heterosexual male characters for decades to come.

Sex in Chains (1928): This Weimar-era drama was one of the first films—but not the last—to explore men’s relationships within the prison system. Director-star William Dieterle (who co-starred in Murnau’s Faust) fled Nazi Germany with his wife and came to Hollywood, where he directed such classics as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I’ll Be Seeing You, Fog Over Frisco, and the Oscar-winning The Life of Emile Zola.

The Broadway Melody (1929): The screen’s first feature-length musical and the second winner of the Best Picture Oscar hasn’t aged well—the camera barely moves, so the numbers are maddeningly stagebound—but this pre-Code film throws in a few LGBTQ+ characters backstage, and some critics have applied a queer reading of the relationship between the two female leads, which was given much more heft than the heterosexual romance.

ICONS

Sergei Eisenstein

The question of whether Eisenstein was gay or asexual remains unanswered for film scholars—he did marry a woman, but only after the USSR passed a law in 1933 prohibiting homosexual relations—but it is undeniable that his innovations as a filmmaker make him one of the indispensable crafters of the medium itself.

A student of engineering and architecture who became a theater director before turning his sights to cinema, Eisenstein is credited with creating the montage as we know it, juxtaposing imagery and crosscutting between people and events to shape narrative in a way that is uniquely cinematic. While his early films were very Soviet in their outlook—dealing with rebellions among workers (Strike) and sailors (Battleship Potemkin), and eventually telling the story of the Russian revolution itself in October: Ten Days That Shook the World—Eisenstein came to Hollywood in 1930 to make a film for Paramount, which never happened, before going to Mexico to make a film produced by Upton Sinclair. (That project, ¡Que viva México!, was taken out of Eisenstein’s hands by Sinclair, and no director’s cut was ever completed.)

Even after these setbacks, Eisenstein returned to Russia to make Alexander Nevsky and the two-part Ivan the Terrible, proving that this master of silent cinema could also flourish in the medium of talking pictures. He died at the age of fifty before completing the third film in the Ivan trilogy, although some footage still exists.

But who was he? As with so many figures and stories of the era, it depends on who’s framing the story. The details are there; it’s the reader who makes the meaning. Here’s one: Néstor Almendros wrote in Film Comment that legendary model Kiki de Montparnasse gave Eisenstein a copy of her memoirs with the dedication, “Moi aussi j’aime les gros bateaux et les matelots” (“I too love big ships and sailors”).

William Haines

William Haines was a charming comedy star of the 1920s who left acting in 1933. Critic Elliott Stein describes the typical Haines character as “a brash, arrogant, and irresponsible all-American Jazz Age collegiate hero, a sort of male flapper, who gets a come-uppance, learns his lesson, becomes a team player, and redeems himself by ‘The End.’”

The circumstances behind “The End” of Haines’s screen career are still a matter of opinion: In his book Wisecracker, William J. Mann asserts that the unapologetically gay Haines refused to capitulate to MGM’s demands that he stay in the closet and marry a woman. Other film scholars observe that by the time his contract ran out, Haines was getting a little long in the tooth to play the kind of juvenile leads that had made him famous. Haines himself told an interviewer in 1949, “I became the oldest college boy in North America… I saw pictures going dry.”

The bare-chested Private “Skeet” Burns (William Haines) chats with Sergeant O’Hara (Lon Chaney, right) during a boxing match in Tell It to the Marines (1926).

In either event, Haines—who was devoted to his partner Jimmie Shields, with the two of them being one of the few same-sex couples who presented themselves as such in Hollywood social circles of the era—successfully reinvented himself as an interior designer. His high-profile clients (and friends) included Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett, and Nancy Reagan. Through his successful second career, he became renowned for a style known as “Hollywood Regency,” designing furniture and interiors not just for Beverly Hills mansions but also for the Winfield House, the London residence of the US ambassador to the United Kingdom. His was a great second act.

Kerrigan as Captain Peter Blood in his final lead role.

J. Warren Kerrigan

This handsome star of early silent cinema—at one point dubbed the “Gibson Man,” a play on the popular “Gibson Girl” archetype—was perhaps the first closeted major movie star. Articles about him loved to trumpet his very close relationship with his mother, with whom he lived. A 1916 Photoplay profile, titled “The Great God Kerrigan,” noted that he was a “Momma’s boy,” while also reassuring readers that the actor “is nothing more than a ‘regular guy,’ with the emphasis on regular” [emphasis theirs]. A year later, the magazine referred to him as “the handsome and the great unwed.”

While the press remained coy about his private life—some contemporary accounts say he had a long-term relationship with fellow silent-screen actor James Carroll Vincent—Kerrigan enjoyed great success from his debut in 1913 until May 1917, when he told an interviewer that “the great mass of men who aren’t good for anything else” should be drafted for service in World War I before “actors, musicians, great writers, artists of every kind.” The controversial statement made headlines around the country and negatively affected Kerrigan’s popularity, even though he continued to act in films.

His star rose again with 1923’s feature-length The Covered Wagon, and his final lead appearance came the following year in Captain Blood when he stepped in for John Barrymore. Accounts differ over whether the death of his mother in 1922 or his involvement in a car accident in December 1923 led to his retirement—or, perhaps, he simply had earned enough money to enjoy a quietly comfortable life—but he faded away from celebrity and lived out the rest of his days in Southern California.

F. W. Murnau

Considered, alongside Fritz Lang, the greatest director of German silent cinema, Murnau made a handful of films that continue to influence the language of movies; tragically, his brilliant career was cut short by a fatal auto accident at the age of forty-two.

The titular Faust (Gösta Ekman) in the clutches of the demon Mephisto (Emil Jannings).

Turning to acting in his youth, when he became a protégé of legendary stage director Max Reinhardt, Murnau had his early career interrupted by World War I. Flying missions over northern France for two years, he eventually landed in Switzerland after getting lost in fog; he spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he worked with a theater group. His lover Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele died on the battlefield, and this tragedy would forever mark Murnau’s life and work.

After the war, Murnau established a studio with actor Conrad Veidt (Different from the Others); one of their first collaborations was 1920’s Der Janus-Kopf, a variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Two years later, Murnau took on another classic of horror literature, Dracula, for what probably remains his best-known film: Nosferatu. Even though the Bram Stoker estate demanded the destruction of all prints of the film after a copyright-violation suit, one survived, enabling the film to live on as a classic of both horror and German Expressionist cinema.

Between 1924 and 1927, Murnau made three of his most significant films, 1924’s The Last Laugh—for which Murnau put his cameraman on roller skates to convey the sensation of the protagonist’s drunkenness—and 1927’s Sunrise—honored at the very first Academy Awards for “Unique and Artistic Production,” a prize that was folded into the Best Picture award the following year.

These two titles bookended Murnau’s queerest project—the 1926 adaptation of Faust, in which a male demon seeks to seduce the hero away from a pure woman who might save his soul. Nosferatu’s Count Orloc losing his composure at the sight of a man’s neck notwithstanding, the existence of Faust—and its arrival in an era where stories that quietly resonated with LGBTQ+ audiences were communicated in terms of subtext—makes it a prime example of a narrative meant for different sets of spectators.

Alla Nazimova

At the turn of the twentieth century, Nazimova dazzled theater audiences in Moscow and then on Broadway before turning to Hollywood in 1916, with a filmed version of her stage hit War Brides. Between 1918 and 1921, she was one of Hollywood’s top five box-office draws, signing a contract with Metro Pictures (which would become MGM in 1924) for the then-astronomical sum of $13,000 a week.

She wisely spent some of that money on a tract of land at Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles, acquiring a mansion that would become famous as “the Garden of Alla.” Perhaps less sensibly, she sank $400,000 of her own money into an avant-garde production of Salomé. Now considered a landmark of silent cinema, the film was a box-office disaster and led to Nazimova’s eventual bankruptcy. She was forced to sell her property, which became the well-known Garden of Allah hotel; Nazimova later lived there, renting a bungalow. (Her neighbors included Orson Welles and a young Frank Sinatra.)

Nazimova in costume as Salomé.

After her Hollywood peak years were behind her, Nazimova continued to work, earning respect for her stage turns in The Cherry Orchard, A Month in the Country, and Ghosts—Tennessee Williams said her performance in the latter inspired him to become a playwright—as well as supporting roles in films, including Blood and Sand and Since You Went Away.

But at the height of her fame, acclaimed for her work, she enjoyed the romantic attention of men and women, including—according to her biographer Gavin Lambert—Mercedes de Acosta, Eva Le Gallienne, and Dorothy Arzner, and lived a big, lavish lifestyle. Lambert even speculates that she might have been one of the inspirations for Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. Nazimova was a force to be reckoned with, a glamorous bisexual powerhouse.

Ramon Novarro

While Ramon Novarro’s tragic demise was a tabloid headline-grabber—in 1968, he was brutally murdered in his home by a pair of male sex workers—he deserves to be remembered as an icon of early American cinema and not just as a Hollywood true-crime statistic. After Rudolph Valentino’s death in 1926, Novarro was primed to be his successor as the screen’s leading “Latin lover,” and the Mexican native became Hollywood’s first successful Latin American leading man.

He enjoyed early success in silent films with action and swashbuckling roles, including Scaramouche and the first feature-length adaptation of Ben-Hur. Unlike others of his generation, he successfully transitioned into talkies opposite the likes of Greta Garbo (Mata Hari) and Myrna Loy (The Barbarian). MGM chose not to renew his contract in 1935 and, after that, he made only a handful of films, for smaller studios or overseas, although he did appear frequently on television throughout the 1960s until his untimely death.

As a product of both his era and his devotion to Roman Catholicism, Novarro had a difficult relationship with his homosexuality, although he had several long-term partners. Thanks to wise real-estate investments—including his Hollywood Hills home, designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright—Novarro managed to live comfortably in his semi-retirement from acting. And while the circumstances of his passing allowed the press to exploit and expose the sexuality he had kept a secret for so long, contemporary LGBTQ+ audiences can honor and embrace his iconography as a queer pioneer.

Ivor Novello

Best known as a songwriter and music-hall entertainer—he co-wrote “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” among many others—Novello also had a notable screen career.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s third film, the 1927 silent thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, Novello stars as Jonathan, the titular tenant who arouses suspicion that he might be the Avenger, a serial killer based on Jack the Ripper. It began a pattern that emerged throughout the director’s career of casting gay men as characters who were untrustworthy or suspicious. (Hitchcock’s next film, Downhill, aka When Boys Leave Home, starred Novello and was based on his play, but no one gets killed in that one.)