There is only one possible end. We are monsters. I don’t like monsters.
Diabolique directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, based his film on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel “Celle qui n’était plus” (She Who Was No More, which Hitchock attemped the buy the rights. The original novel is overt, in referring to the two women carrying on a lesbian relationship. Clouzot made this more implied in the film. Boileau and Narcejac then wrote D’Entre les Morts” (From Among the Dead) specifically for Alfred Hitchcock, who then subsequently adapted to the screen as Vertigo in 1958.
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 French psycho-sexual thriller Diabolique set off a tone of thrillers to come, with its atmospheric looking-glass quality and suggestion of both lesbianism and the supernatural. Véra Clouzot stars as Christina Delassalle the wife of a cruel headmaster Michel Delassalle ( Paul Meurisse) at a private boarding school.
His wife Christina and mistress, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret) conspire to kill him and give themselves a perfect alibi. Christina is a fragile sort, with a weak heart, and beaten down by her husband’s physical and mental abuse (he calls her his little ruin). Nicole is self-reliant and aggressive. The two women form a bond, with an unspoken tinge of their lesbian alliance. Along the way, Nicole must push Christina to go through with their plans to murder Michel and be rid of Michellthe swine, forever. After his death, there are sightings of him on the grounds of the school. This injects an element of the uncanny into the plot unless there is something more insidious at the core. Throughout the picture, there is a strong sense of Sapphic tension and allusions to the two women’s sexual relationship. In the novel She Who Was No More, the two women were clearly, lesbian lovers.
M. Drain Professeur “I may be reactionary, but this is absolutely astounding – the legal wife consoling the mistress! No, no, and no!”
Christina Delassalle “There is only one possible end. We are monsters. I don’t like monsters.”
Nicole Horner “If it’s only him, I feel better. I’ll save the grain of sand falling from the hands of providence for my morality lessons.”
Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s French thriller Diabolique (1955) it inspired him to create a dark and psycho-sexual black & white film that would also shock his audience and be a success at the box office.
With his horror film — quasi-noir-tinged Psycho (1960), he engendered a whole new brand of Schadenfreude with his outre creepy film adapted from the story by Robert Bloch about Norman Bates who personifies the Oedipal relationship between himself and his castrating mother.
The mysterious Mrs. Bates is never seen on screen, except for her voice that croaks out stern remarks from behind her bedroom door. In order to manifest his vengeful mother’s overarching power, he brings her to life by dressing in her clothes and killing anyone Norman has sexual desires for. Norman Bates became the poster boy for the cross-dressing psychopathic killer with latent homosexual tendencies brought about by his over-possessive mother. Though these disparaging visions of gay characters existed on screen, Norman Bates WAS a cinematic prototype and composite of serial killer Ed Gein, who did in fact go on a killing spree in Wisconsin in the 1950s and 60s, Gein wore women’s clothing and he also wore their skin, sharing Norman’s fascination with taxidermy. He also carried on conversations with his dead mother, which he dug up and kept on the old creepy family farm. In later years, the graphically perverse Deranged (1974) starring Robert Blossom was released as a direct biographical film about Gein’s life. Later on, it became the interlace of the story which would be the gory incidentals in 1991, in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, where Buffalo Bill would also become iconic and a composite of Ed Gein.
William Castle’s Homicidal 1961 was directed by the king of ballyhoo, who answered Alfred Hitchcock’s horror noir with his own cringe-worthy psycho-sexual film featuring the cross-dressing Jean Arliss as Emily/Warren — another psychopathic gender-bending murderer. The brutal stabbing murder of a justice-of-the-peace sparks an investigation of dark family secrets in a sleepy small town in Southern California. Also stars Glenn Corbett and Patricia Breslin.
A peculiar young man, Warren (Jean Arliss), plots to murder his half-sister, Miriam Webster (Patricia Breslin) in order to collect the family fortune. Miriam is supposed to share her inheritance with her half-brother Warren who lives with his nanny and now guardian Helga (Eugenie Leontovich), an old woman confined to a wheelchair. Helga has recently been struck down by a stroke, barely able to move or speak, she can only tap out something like Morse code with her trusty doorknob. Warren is a strange and menacing figure who projects an undercurrent of hostility toward his childhood guardian. Warren and Helga live in the old family mansion, where he and Miriam grew up. Helga is taken care of by a pretty blonde nurse Emily, who seems to have formed a close relationship with Warren.
Miriam Webster: "I remember when we were kids, you took this doll away from me and I never saw it again."
Warren "You want it? Take it."
Making its departure from gruesome queer killers, Hollywood contributed to the screen another type of threatening’ gay subtext. With James Dean, who exuded tragic emotional disturbances, and the tough sensitivity of Marlon Brando, who dressed in worn-out leather to cover up the pathos oozing from his deep eyes and rugged voice. Dyer refers to these actors as the sensitive ‘spectacularized young man’.
In director Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) a most talked about film with homosexual undertones, particularly from Sal Mineo’s (openly queer) portrayal of Plato. James Dean is on fire with teenage angst as Jim Stark, whose father is an emasculated, weak male figure. There is a lot more light that passes through Plato’s homosexuality, as he exudes more than the hero worship of Jim. There’s a tell-tale scene when Plato is combing his hair in the mirror of his locker, decorated with a photo of Gary Cooper. Jim is walking down the hallway, and as Plato catches sight of him, his gaze is eroticized.
The character of Plato is played as an unstable youth, and Jim comes from a family with a domineering mother who emasculates his apron-wearing gutless father… In 1955, the question of homosexuality still had to be handled on screen as a question of deviance, Plato, therefore, must pay for his transgressions with his life.
There is also a moral warning for parents. Represent good role models of a heterosexual ideal or your kids might turn out either troubled or queer. It is a cautionary tale about paying attention to heteronormative expectations "” in the end, the story is sewn up with Jim grabbing his father as he tells him it’ll be alright.
Ray’s film with its heavily rendered homosexual subtext avails itself of dialogue that is easily interpreted as sexually ambiguous. “Are you ready to come out yet?”
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In Howard Hawk’s Gentleman Prefer Blondes, 1953 Jane Russell does one of her lively musical numbers which suggests a very tongue-in-cheek hint at ‘gay panic’ when her character Dorothy Shaw is surrounded by a chorus of muscle-bound weightlifters in homoerotic swim trunks that pay Dorothy no mind."Doesn't anyone want to play?"
In a more deeply disturbing narrative, director Jack Garfein’s The Strange One (1957) is told within the milieu of a military boarding school, where Jocko De Paris (Ben Gazzara) a manipulative upperclassman holds a sadistic rule over the other cadets. The root cause is suggested that Jocko’s ambiguous violent schemes are linked to his latent homosexuality.
the film wallows in a steamy mixture of homoerotic imagery and verbal innuendo. The mise-en-scene is filled with phallic signifiers, such as towers, trumpets, cigars, flashlights, nightsticks, bottles brooms swords and scores of erect young men marching sweatingly through the night… The specter of homosexuality also envelops the characters of Cadet Perrin, and effete poet who idolworhips Jocko and Cadet Simmons, a Peter Lorre look-alike who refuses to date girls or shower with the other cadets. Ultimately all this queerness is dislplace onto Jocko’s violent sadism, a linkage not uncommon in the ear’s medical discourse about homosexuality… Jocko calls Cadet Perrin a ‘three-dollar bill” and repeatedly towel whips his ass its hard not to read the scene as a metaphoric sodomy wherein (Code-sanctioned) homosocial violence displaces (Code -forbidden ) homosexual contact. The story itself is an extended gloss on secrecy in the barracks centering on a bizzare narrative event that also speaks of homosexuality in barely coded ways.(Jeffrey Sconce)
While Tennessee William’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) conflated homosexuality with the devouring mother archetype, promiscuity, cruising, pedophilia, and cannibalism. It’s a melodrama that could very easily share the shock scenes and denouement with some of the most gruesome horror films.
Not to forget Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956) where John Kerr, sewing with the ladies and removed from all sports is barely veiled as a homosexual, though the picture throws Deborah Kerr at him in one night’s sexual encounter to awaken his maleness. The film is so uncomfortable with itself because it dares not admit Tom’s homosexuality.
Even as the Production Code authorities attempted to expurgate "homosexuality" per se from the film version of Tea and Sympathy 1956"”focusing instead on the euphemism of its young protagonist's effeminacy this move fooled few spectators and simultaneously reinforced a stereotypical and reassuring blurring of effeminacy and male homosexuality. (Foster Hirsch-The Dark Side of the Screen)
Where homosexuals are either portrayed as deviants or boys who have had their masculinity neutered for them, lesbians have a symbology all their own. In director Gerd Oswald’s psychotronic cult film Screaming Mimi (1958) starring Anita Ekberg, Gypsy Rose Lee plays exotic night club owner Joann ‘Gypsy’ Masters, a veiled lesbian who runs the burlesque show and looks after her girls.
Exotic dancer Anita Ekberg surrounds herself with her Great Dane…
In contrast to coded characters, in Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) the outed queer character Melville Farr is played by Dirk Bogard. one of the gay men being targeted by a blackmail plot during the 1960s London, coinciding with the death of a young man, whom Bogard had a fling with. The subject of homosexuality was out in the open in Dearden’s bold 1961 film which deals with homosexuality as the central plot. Yet it drops the characters into a seedy pit of unsavory intrigue surrounding gay men and their criminal affiliations. Victim is one of the first films dealing with homosexuality directly, as the central storyline, confronting some of the issues in a serious manner without demonizing its leading character Melville Farr, yet trying to examine how being in the closet causes so much psychological turmoil and heartache.
Lesbians are often portrayed as harsh and tyrannical, or on the femme side they’re trashy and beaten down. For example, in director Gordon Douglas’ Tony Rome (1967) After 1961 times were changing and the Code was forced to ease up on policing the content of pictures coming out of Hollywood. One of the first signs of the lesbian innuendo with more of a kick to it, was in director Gordon Douglas’ Tony Rome 1967. The equation of lesbian love with tyranny is also the strongest impression we get from that scene between Irene and Georgia (uncredited Deanna Lund) in the caravan.
Georgia the stripper might be seen as a lady who gets what she wants with no interference but she also lives in a caravan with Irene (character actor Elizabeth Fraser). In the film, she plays a dowdy heavy-set unspoken lesbian lover (who is credited on IMDb as Irma.) The film doesn't call their relationship out by name, but the dialogue contains sharp innuendo dished out by the smooth-talking Sinatra who says to Georgia about an old boyfriend of hers. Tony’s been trying to track him down. Redheaded Georgia (Deanna Lund), a stripper who’s shacked up with her ‘roommate’, as abusive and whiny as the men who used to beat her.
Tony to Georgia about her ex-boyfriend –"Maybe he was trying to get into the wrong ballpark."
After Irene who seems overly possessive, jealous, unstable, and isn’t the most fashionable 60s lesbian, begins smacking Georgia around until they both fall on the small caravan bed as Irene whimpers, that she’s sorry for hitting her.
Tony smirks- "You want the lights on or off?… They're better off."
Tony Rome is scattered with a few distasteful scenes, characteristic of late 6os cinema, queers were not portrayed in a very good light. While the film has a groovy 60s vibe, some smart-alecky dialogue, and the presence of Sinatra who plays it cool, the decades’ propensity for painting gays with a dirty brush is ever present in Gordon Douglas’ crime drama.
Lloyd Bochner plays an effete drug dealer named Vic. A brief teaser role that seems to have flown under the gay radar. Bochner portrays Vic with a pretentiously fake obstinance, wears an ascot, and listens to classical music in his kitschy pad. Tony shows up looking for a user who will be trying to score from Vic. After he roughs Vic up a bit, Rome prepares himself a hamburger on the stove and asks Vic with a mocking tone “How do you like your meat?”
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The tyrannical relationships between lesbians in the world of the classic film noir where there was more of a power differential, between employer/employee, etc (Rebecca, In a Lonely Place, Walk on the Wild Side for instance) carry over into films where the lesbian characters are not only visible but they are supposed to be each others’ social equal.
The emphasis on lesbians as working women can exhibit keen elements of cruelty and violence of either the servants to mistresses as with Mrs. Danvers and the second Mrs. de Winter (Rebecca) and Martha to Laurel (In a Lonely Place). But also the dominance that madams show to the ‘girls’ in their stable. This manifestation of iron-handed emotions leaves us suspicious of what the attraction is to women, or the object of their affection.
As the Hays Code began to crumble and it was gasping its last bitter breath, the lesbian character was made visible on screen. This is the case of Dirk Bogard in Dearden’s Victim or with George (Beryl Reid) and Childie (Susannah York) in Robert Aldrich’s painfully revealing exploration of an aging dyke in THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE (1968), where lesbianism is out in the open for the audience but not for the character of Sister George who is a beloved soap opera star for BBC. She tries to make her private life separate from her career as a well-loved nurse on the popular television show. But June Buckridge who plays the character of George, is compelled to cause sabotage both her private and public life with her shameless reputation for drinking too much and goosing nuns in taxi cabs. She is a belligerent, self-hating lesbian who is trapped within her private closet trying to hold onto her girlfriend, who is a wandering woman/child.
The sixties ushered in several interesting films that still cast a veil of secrecy over queer cinema before films became franker with gay subjects as the lead story. One of the most flirtatious and entertaining with more than a queer inkling or attentive innuendo is THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN (1960) a homosocial/partly-homosexual buddy film about men coming together to rob a bank. As the Criterion Collection calls it, “precisely calibrated caper… influences countless Hollywood heist films.”
One of the unprecedented aspects of Dearden’s film for 1960, is not only is the narrative steeped in queer innuendo, homosexuality is not tangential to the plot, a few of the main characters are ‘queer’, and they are not stereotypical.
Director Basil Dearden’s impressively quirky British heist movie stars the accomplished Jack Hawkins as Hyde and equally brilliant Nigel Patrick as Major Race. Hyde is a resentful Colonel who was forced into retirement as he was ‘redundant’. He recruits an eccentric group of disgraced petty criminals, ex-British army officers, to help him pull off a meticulous bank heist that includes infiltrating a military compound. Hyde has the goods on all of their shady pasts and influences them to accept his offer. Race becomes his most trusted ally and implied lover, who used to run the black market in Hamburg. The film also stars some of British greats, Richard Attenborough, Kieron Moore, and Bryan Forbes who went on to direct, and Roger Livesey. Hyde assigns each one a task that matches their expertise.
Women are rarely seen except for the opening of the picture and are not part of the narrative, merely to illustrate that they are not quite essential or actually a drag on the men’s lives. There are no romantic relationships on the periphery, just Attenborough lusting after a pretty young skirt. For the most part, women are not shown in a good light. They are either whores, shrews catering to their doddering old father-in-law, cling insecure older women being used by Forbes, the rest are bitches. Women are the counterbalance of the film’s antiheroes, who form a homosocial circle. Though I wonder if there isn’t a form of homosocial order within a female assembly, like prisons and convents, that have their own shape of erotic engagement. I might call this experience, ‘sapphic-social.’
Gentlemen have a definite undercurrent of sexual attraction between Hyde (Hawkins) and Race (Patrick). Often the two exchange glances and trade coquetry, while there is a seductive ambiance to many of their interactions, especially when Hyde tells Race to spend the night. He also requests that Race drop the old "˜darling' bit and then Race calls him Old Dear instead. Their entire relationship is flirtatious "” and when Race dons an apron and does the dishes with Hawkins, it’s divine.
Race looking at a portrait, “Is that your wife is she dead?”
Hyde "Oh no, the bitch is still going very strong.”
"One gets into terrible habits at the YMCA" and “You’d be surprised where I’ve parked my Caravan.” Race tells Hawkins. Race tells him “You’re spoiling me.” Hyde tells him “All my men loved me.”
Kieran Moore is being blackmailed but it is only implied that he is homosexual. "Well there are thrills and "˜thrills' " he tells his patron whom he is massaging. There is a reference to him by one of the others that he's an "odd man out." And Lexy (Richard Attenborough) acts green around the gills because he has to room with him.
For a gripping, black comedic crime thriller, the more than implied queerness makes The League of Gentlemen, a variation on Boys in the Band, a sort of, Boys in the Bank Robbery will do nicely!
Then in 1962, Peter Ustinov directed BILLY BUDD based on the novel by Herman Melville. Billy Budd stars Robert Ryan as John Claggart Master of Arms, Peter Ustinov as Capt. Vere, and co-stars Melvyn Douglas, Paul Rogers, David McCallum, Ronald Lewis, Niall MacGinnis, and Terence Stamp As Billy Budd. Billy Budd (Terence Stamp) is an innocent, naive seaman in the British Navy in 1797. When the ship’s sadistic master-at-arms is murdered, Billy is accused and tried. Claggart ( Robert Ryan) has a ‘queer’ fixation on Billy. Laura Mulvey terms this fixation as a case of ‘scopophilia’ which describes the psychological tendency towards deriving aesthetic pleasure from looking at something or someone. In terms of masculinity/femininity and subjectivity and objectivity.
In her book Epistemology of the Closet (1990/2008), Eve Sedgwick, expanding on earlier interpretations of the same themes, posits that the interrelationships between Billy, Claggart and Captain Vere are representations of male homosexual desire and the mechanisms of prohibition against this desire. She points out that Claggart’s “natural depravity,” which is defined tautologically as “depravity according to nature,” and the accumulation of equivocal terms (“phenomenal”, “mystery”, etc.) used in the explanation of the fault in his character, are an indication of his status as the central homosexual figure in the text. She also interprets the mutiny scare aboard the Bellipotent, the political circumstances that are at the center of the events of the story, as a portrayal of homophobia.
The centrality of Billy Budd’s extraordinary good looks in the novella, where he is described by Captain Vere as “the young fellow who seems so popular with the men"”Billy, the Handsome Sailor”, have led to interpretations of a homoerotic sensibility in the novel.
King Rat (1965) written by James Clavell (To, Sir With Love 1967, The Great Escape 1963) directed by Bryan Forbes (Seance on a Wet Afternoon 1964, The Whisperers 1967), and astounding Miltonian cinematography by Burnett Guffey (All the King’s Men 1947, From Here to Eternity 1953, Birdman of Alcatraz 1962, Bonnie and Clyde 1967), framing the prisoners steeped in hell. The scene at the end with the collective wide shot of the hollowed-out men not quite connected to the world anymore, or their coming release, reminds me of the potent image from Paths of Glory (1957). King Rat, is a meditation on humanity, when British and American prisoners of war are captured and thrown into a Japanese camp in Changi.
In some of the more subtle homosexual subtexts, King Rat shows Dr. Kennedy (James Donald) using an acid tongue with his male nurse Stevens (Michael Lees) Kennedy’s hostility is the one trace of homophobia in the picture. "˜Stop trying to pretend you're Florence Nightingale" and "You shave your legs and you're a liar. Forbes himself never showed any homophobia in his work, even considering Cicely Courtneidge as a sympathetic lesbian in The L Shaped Room (1962), and Stevens in The League of Gentlemen (1960).
Director Bryan Forbe’s films came to grips with taboo subjects in his realist style of 1960s cinema, in much the same way Robert Aldrich populated his films with misfits and outsiders — The L Shaped Room examines converging stories and social minefields, including unwed motherhood, lesbianism, and race. Forbe’s work delved into humanity in a microcosmic tableau.
But if one were to look at the film objectively there is nothing on its face that couldn’t be read one way or the other. George Segal is Corporal King (‘Rat’) who runs a lucrative black market always scheming and plotting within his close circle of men, the Guards, and the Malay locals to obtain contraband. His position as a black marketeer helps him transcend his rank within that prison camp.
But freedom meant that he would be stripped of his privilege. King lives a better life than anyone else in the POW camp, but he does bring a bit of release and small obtainables which to the desperate, become luxuries for the other men. There is a sharp contrast between his freshly laundered shirts, combed hair, clean face and while other men starve and wear soiled, tattered rags. Pete Marlowe begins to respect King who he comes to see, not only as a clever mercenary but someone who brings a bit of dignity to the other men.
James Fox gives an astounding performance as Pete, a gentle, fair-minded upper-class Brit who also is trying to make the best of his captivity. The men in the camp have very little rations, and the extreme heat is enough to dry a man to dust. There’s also diphtheria, malaria, insanity, and undignified death. They are reduced to animals struggling to survive, so beaten down they’ve lost their soul in their eyes. But in the midst of this hell, the nameless King never shows more than sweaty armpits in his freshly cleaned uniform, while the others are half-naked and emaciated. King has fresh eggs, cigarettes, and deals going on with Japanese soldiers to make a lot of money, which makes him feel like a big man. Back in civilization, he was a nobody but here he flourishes because he is in charge. In this isolated camp, his cunning has made him the most influential, and at times, predatory of men.
Men can sink to the depths of hell when they are treated like animals. The film is an example of a homo-social dynamic of camaraderie against a common obstacle. Homosocial behavior is often seen in films where men are thrown together and must bond, in particular prison movies and war films, where men are dependent on each other and forced to survive.
It is given in both male and women’s prison movies, that there might be a sexual relationship, out of necessity. With men, it would be because there aren't any women and they need someone to depend on and form a close bond with. But once they are free, they go back to their heterosexuality.
What makes King Rat such a strong film coded with homosexual subtext is the bond that Pete and King form at the very beginning. Forbe’s film never comes out and tells us that the two men have fallen in love. On the surface, it is about a strong friendship that grows between the two. But it is obvious if you look at it through a queer lens, that there is a romantic dynamic between them. Pete is more overtly queer, while King never lets his guard down to anyone, Pete is the only one he takes into his intimate space.
From the beginning, there's a subtle flirtation. King doesn't treat anyone else like he treats Pete. At the first meeting, he makes him a fried egg. Pete comments, when does one have to kiss his ass? The men in the hut turn and look at the two of them curiously. King tells Pete never before meals.
As Pete grows closer to King, it is more apparent that he is effeminate and is immediately drawn to King. Pete moves very fluidly, while everyone wears shorts or long pants, he wears a traditional skirt and walks like a sylph. Very quickly he falls under King's spell. The two men gradually fall in love, and as the film progresses, we can see a strong friendship, but those of us who are either in the know or know what they’re looking at, will see the homosexual love story.
Hollywood proposes films that appear heterosexual but have suggestive coding. There are many scenes of tenderness, caring, and affection that speaks of homo-erotic desire that hasn't been consummated but lingers around the two men. Pete has a strong longing for King, but once the prisoners are freed, King pushes Pete away not only because he will be losing any identification with great importance, he will be going back to obscurity. Now he must bury his homosexual feelings and go back to his straight life.
In one scene when Pete is suffering from gangrene and might lose his arm, King takes his head and strokes his face passionately, caressing his neck and cheeks. King who always looks out for himself, pays a lot of money to get the medicine to heal Pete. He sits by his bedside and holds his hand, without his usual dress army shirt, King is bare-chested for the first time. It’s a very homoerotic moment when King sits by Pete’s bed, his sweat glistening by the bedside light.
At one point King talks about how he never got the dolls (women) back home, all the fat men with money got the girls. The mentioning of his heterosexuality is a way to appease the censors and draw away the implication that he might be gay. This qualifies his heterosexuality to prepare for the following moment where he is stroking Pete’s face, taking it in his hands, and bringing his own face close to his in a moment that might erupt in a kiss. Now that King has just talked about looking at dolls, this can be read as a hetero friendship and not a homoerotic one.
Ultimately when the war is declared over, King must deny and dismiss Pete completely in order to shed his homosexuality. But Pete is devastated "”King becomes cold and cruel. Pete implores him "You called me Sir last nightThe war is over, but you and me, we're just the same.”
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But King has already decided to walk away from their "˜homoerotic friendship' – Peter pleads with him, "People don't change. I'm not ashamed that you and I are friends. We survived it. Don't you remember what we had, don't you remember that? Don't ask me to forget all that. Otherwise, what's it all been made of? I'm not different.”
At the very end, Pete actually says King’s (which has merely been his nickname ), last name, which we hear for the first time during the film, it symbolizes the intrusion of the real world on their insulated existence. When King is leaving with the Americans, Pete runs frantically toward him, trying to say goodbye. King looks at him from the truck, for the last time, he reveals to Pete one lingering stare- a despairing, longing look at Pete to let him know, it was real.
Continue reading “Chapter 5 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:” →
