For the
month of June, Turner Classic Movies celebrates
Pride by airing a treasure trove of gay films.
Well, it's June
again, and for many cable networks that means it's time
to mark Pride Month with a halfhearted rerun of every
notable post-1990 queer film they can get their hands
on. But leave it to Turner Classic Movies to dig
deeply into its vaults for "Screened Out: Gay Images in
Film," a 44-film series running Mondays and Wednesdays all
month long. Based on Richard Barrios's book
Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from
Edison to Stonewall, the series offers a
varied look at gay characters in American film: from swishy
supporting roles (mostly banished from the screen after the
Hays Code went into effect) to butch prison matrons to
seductive, unscrupulous, exotic inverts of any gender.
Throughout the
month TCM will offer an eclectic mix, including
well-known titles like The Children's Hour and
The Boys in the Band, but even more
interestingly, obscurities like Our
Betters (a movie I've been dying to watch since seeing a
30-second clip of it in The Celluloid Closet)
and Staircase—in which Stanley Donen directs
Richard Burton and Rex Harrison as a bickering gay
couple; not even their combined star power could make
this film available on video for the last 25 years.

Author Mart Crowley (bottom row, center) with the cast of
The Boys in the Band.
It was a labor of
love for Barrios. "I wouldn't say it was difficult to
come up with the list that I did," the author notes,
"because there were some titles that I knew were
absolutely necessary (The Sign of the Cross; Our Betters;
Tea and Sympathy; Suddenly, Last Summer, to
name a few), and others that I wanted to make sure
were a part of the series, like Voodoo Island
and Staircase. But the whole point of my book
Screened Out, and a point I've tried to
stress in our TCM series, is that these were not just
isolated examples. There were dozens of films in the
early 1930s, for example, that feature small but
pungent scenes with gay characters, and I cite a
number of later examples in the book as well. So really,
there was a large storehouse to choose from."
And while TCM has
opened that storehouse in Junes past to salute the
likes of George Cukor and Dorothy Arzner, this marks the
first time that the network has unabashedly slapped a
"gay" label on a film series.

George Cukor (center) with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.
"We have done
programming related to gay pride, but this is the first
time we've treated it as a major theme," says Charlie
Tabesh, senior vice president of programming for TCM.
"The breadth of our film library allows us to explore
the careers of actors, directors, cinematographers,
etc., and various themes and movements in film in
greater depth than is offered anywhere else on television.
We're very interested in all aspects of film history,
and the evolution of how homosexuals have been
portrayed by mainstream Hollywood is an important
subject."
Based on TCM's
programming—classic Hollywood with a smattering of
cult, foreign, and underground cinema—logic
would dictate that the network attracts not only a big
gay audience but also a substantial audience of
over-50s who might not cozy up to "Screened Out." "We expect
some controversy," admits Tabesh. "It is important to note
that only a few of the films we're showing as part of
'Screened Out' were controversial in their time. The
overwhelming majority were mainstream Hollywood films
whose depictions of homosexuality were more subversive
and therefore less controversial." In other words, if a gay
or lesbian character sneaked in under the censors'
eyes, it's more Pillow Talk than Suddenly,
Last Summer.

The ladies of Caged.
"Screened Out"
offers an unprecedented breadth of queer cinema for
American TV—having Victim show up on cable
seems daring enough, but to have evenings devoted to films
like The Fox,Caged, and Algie, the Miner, much less having
an institution like TCM put classics like Gilda
or The Big Combo into a queer context, is downright
provocative. Barrios will appear alongside the network's
reigning éminence grise, Robert Osborne, to let
viewers know what they're in for, and TCM has shot
interstitials with the likes of Alan Cumming, Armistead
Maupin, and William J. Mann to talk about larger issues of
queerdom and the cinema. (But no lesbian experts, TCM?
Not having a B. Ruby Rich or an Angela Robinson
talking about Ladies They Talk About is a
glaring omission.)

Audrey Hebpurn and Shirley MacLaine in The Children's Hour.
Ultimately, while
seeing films like these often shows us how far along
we've come, they also remind us that there's work to be done
in terms of queer representation in mainstream cinema.
Notes Barrios, "It seems that television—and,
in some ways, indie films—are still picking up a
good deal of the slack that, in an earlier day, mainstream
film would've done. Alas, the money aspect is still
the bottom line, and films with gay/lesbian themes are
still not viewed as being cash grabbers. It's true
that we've come a long way since Suddenly, Last
Summer or The Children's Hour...but it's
clear that, as far as the big screen is concerned, there's
still a far way to go."
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Duralde is the author of 101 Must-see Movies for Gay
Men.