Hollywood Bohemians and Others

Greta Garbo and Ramón Novarro

Conventional wisdom has it that in its golden age from 1920 to 1950, Hollywood was a very unwelcome place for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. But in fact, as recent studies by William J. Mann, David Ehrenstein and other writers have told us, Tinseltown was crawling with queers.

Even after the Production Code (1934) barred overt homosexual behavior from our nation’s movie screens, GLBT people continued to flourish in the movie industry – just as long as they played the game and stayed clear of Los Angeles’ increasingly homophobic police department.

In fact, between 1917 and 1941 many Hollywood studios, gossip columnists and novelists used gay people, trans-people and adulterers to depict and promote the “glamorous Hollywood lifestyle.”

Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream (McFarland; 248 pages; $35.95) is not so much a history of “gay Hollywood” as a history of how movie makers, writers and publicists used “Hollywood bohemians” to construct the public image of Hollywood as a place that was shocking, naughty and fun.

According to author Brett L. Abrams, and contrary to the Production Code’s suppression of homosexual behavior in motion pictures, “the images of adulterers, homosexuals and cross-dressers appeared in a ... positive light in fictional movies and novels about Hollywood. They also appeared in the publicity materials that the Hollywood studios and news media released.”

Hollywood Bohemians gives us many examples of “Hollywood bohemians:” female impersonators, cross-dressing females, odd bachelors and magnificent spinsters in Movieland fact, factoid and fiction. Forgotten folks such as Thelma Todd, Julian Eltinge, Mercedes de Acosta and Ramón Novarro rub elbows with more familiar celebs, including Greta Garbo and Cary Grant, in Abrams’ fascinating pages.

One of Hollywood’s (bohemian or otherwise) favorite getaways was and is the desert resort of Palm Springs. Today Palm Springs is “the most famous gay and lesbian hometown and resort in America,” the home of a score of “clothing-optional” gay guesthouses, the White Party (for guys) and the Dinah Shore weekend (for gals).

But Palm Springs was not always the Gay Mecca that it is today. For a long time, Palm Springs’ city government was controlled by an “old boys” club that frowned upon sexual non-conformity, and as late as the 1960s, a local preacher was run out of town when the local yokels learned that he was gay.

All of that is a thing of the past, and now GLBT people dominate the Palm Springs city government to a degree unheard of anywhere in America outside of West Hollywood, Wilton Manors, Florida or Provincetown, Massachusetts. How celebrities made Palm Springs a gay and lesbian paradise is the theme of David Wallace’s new book A City Comes Out (Barricade Books; 240 pages; $23.95).

Among the Tinseltown notables who came to Palm Springs for fun and profit were queer celebs such as Claudette Colbert, Mary Martin, Liberace, Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter. All of these folks had tales to tell and Wallace, a prolific author of popular Hollywood histories, has no problem telling them. And to prove that the “old boys” club is long gone from Palm Springs politics, A City Comes Out also features openly gay politicians, including Mayor Stephen Pougnet (the city’s second out mayor in a row) and City Councilman Rick Hutcheson.

Gay men of a certain age, myself included, like to reminisce about the “good old days” of the 1970s, days of sexual freedom uninterrupted by anti-sex politics and HIV infections. But what we miss the most about the “Titanic 1970s” (before it struck the AIDS iceberg) was not unbridled sex, but rather the friends and lovers we lost to the epidemic.