The Evolution of the Hollywood Gay Joke in Three Easy Stages

The history of queer characters in mainstream movies has been, at least in part, a history of heterosexual protagonists making fun of gay second bananas. It’s pretty much a given that the gay guy never gets to be the hero, so it boils down to how the supporting gay is going to be handled by the major players and what style of humor society has deemed appropriate for the era when the movie was made.

In the same way that gays off the screen spent the 20th century going from invisible to mocked to militant to a fact of life, so did the "funny" barbs sent our way on the big screen.

Phase One: “You’re gay, and you’re ridiculous.”

When movies began to talk in the late 1920s and beyond, gays were still pretty invisible in American society; that invisibility was mirrored on screen, particularly after the studios started enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code in the mid-1930s, banning all references to “sexual perversion” as part of a laundry list that also forbid open-mouth kissing or the mockery of religion.

Still, if you knew where to look, you could spot gay characters. They were the butlers (Eric Blore) and gigolos (Erik Rhodes) and henpecked husbands (Edward Everett Horton) in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals and the gossipy bridge-players in screwball comedies. But while these characters were capable of generating laughs on their own, they also served as convenient punching bags for starring straights.

Eric Blore (left and center), Edward Everett Horton

Take, for example, Rex O’Malley as Marcel in the classic 1939 comedy Midnight. He fires off one great bon mot and non sequitur after another, but when he goads the Baroness (Claudette Colbert) to divulge secrets about her marriage – O’Malley works the word “please” like none other – John Barrymore’s Georges tells her if she doesn’t “it will kill Marcel.” (Marcel, for his part, volleys back a deadly eyebrow-raise.)

Rex O'Malley third from the left

The implication of the “you’re ridiculous” joke is, “you’re like a woman,” “you’re not really a man,” “you’re inconsequential.” As Lily Tomlin notes in the narration of the essential gays-on-film documentary The Celluloid Closet, characters like this existed to make men seem manlier and women seem womanlier by occupying the space in between.

And while these flighty flibbertigibbets were rarely treated with outright hostility, they were generally dismissed as inconsequential puffballs.

And this wasn’t just in the 1930s, mind you. In the 1961 Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy Lover Come Back – Rock Hudson and Tony Randall’s relationship in these movies merits a doctoral thesis unto itself – there’s this exchange between Day’s advertising exec Carol Templeton and her art director Leonard, played by Chet Stratton:

Carol (looking at a mock-up ad Leonard has created): Mm, this isn’t bad either. But what color is that floor?
Leonard: Lilac.
Carol: Lilac? Leonard, who has a lilac floor in their kitchen?
Leonard (haughtily): I have.
Carol (somewhat flustered): Oh. Well, uh, Leonard, everyone isn’t as artistic as you are. We have to sell this [floor] wax to average, ordinary, everyday people!
Leonard (sneering): Eeuuhh – them!

Chet Stratton, Doris Day and Rock Hudson

Whether a filmmaker is trying to establish an exotic locale or to make the point that his female protagonist is surrounded by girly-men and thus waiting for a manly alpha dog to sweep her off her feet, the prissy sissy played an invaluable role in decades of Hollywood screen comedy.

And while he generally got put down, his treatment was way better than what the next generation of movie gays would get.

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