Hollywood Pride: The LGBTQ+ Community's Impact on Films

Hollywood has a long and storied history, but June is Pride Month, and it is important to note the LGBTQ+ community's impact on that history is often overlooked.

Film critic and podcaster Alonso Duralde has a new book, "Hollywood Pride, A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film," a thorough timeline of LGBTQ+ representation in films, and the actors and behind-the-scenes crew who need to be recognized for their impact on Hollywood.

"I wasn't surprised by people that I was familiar with as much as new ones that I learned about; the heroes behind the scenes who were never necessarily in the spotlight, but wound up being important in one way or another," said Duralde, 57. "For example, Thomas Gomez was the first Spanish American to be nominated for an Oscar who was gay. I didn't know about Angela Morley, the composer who was the first openly trans person to be nominated for an Oscar, or James Crabe, the cinematographer who worked on "Rocky" and "The Karate Kid" before dying of AIDS-related complications in the 1980s."

Duralde's book is an entertaining encyclopedia of LGBTQ+ actors and actresses and those who were advocates for the community including Vincent Price, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland and Marlon Brando.

Duralde delves into the history and connection of LGBTQ+ in terms of how the community is portrayed in some of our most classic movies, including "The Maltese Falcon," "The Wizard of Oz" and "Casablanca."

Regarding "Casablanca," he writes, "Sure, this one might seem like a stretch, but think about it: Does Humphrey Bogart's Rick wind up with Ilsa, the love of his life? No, he winds up with Captain Renault (Claude Rains) who's been spending the whole movie saying things like, "Rick is the kind of man that . . . well, if I were a woman, and I were not around, I should be in love with Rick."

"In the case of "The Maltese Falcon," the character in the book is pretty clearly delineated as gay and even an earlier movie adaptation of the novel which was Pre-Code was allowed to be a little more explicit about that," he explained. (The Pre-Code Era was a period around the early 1930s when illicit sex and violence were common themes in American movies.)

Much of LGBTQ+ history in movies, Duralde explains, also depended on the economic realities of the era in which they were made. "In the 40s, movies like "Crossfire" just completely obliterated the queer content, and the excuse, of course, was the production code and that they weren't allowed to adapt [the films] in the right way," he said.

Another example is the 1985 Steven Spielberg version of "The Color Purple," which as Duralde writes in "Hollywood Pride," "angered some queer viewers by skimming over the book's key lesbian relationship."

"Spielberg was making a major studio movie and the studio was expecting to make its money back and was skittish about going as deeply into that relationship as Alice Walker had the liberty to do on the page, but as time passes it's excuses," Duralde said.

Other movies and how they incorporate LGBTQ+ characters and storylines impress the author.

"I find it very heartening when a movie like "Red, White & Royal Blue," for instance, has some characters who get chopped off along the way, which happens when you adapt a novel into a movie, but the queer content is absolutely all still there front and center and they aren't pretending like it's something else," he said.

Beyond that, Duralde says that artists will tell you what they mean in a movie, but viewers will still watch and take what they want away from it.

"The classic example is "The Wizard of Oz,""he said. "Is there anything specifically queer about its content? No. Have generations of queer audience audiences found aspects of it that spoke directly to their lives? Absolutely."

Alonso also explains that the perception of the closet in Hollywood and what it means when an actor comes out has changed so much over the years.

"I worked with The Advocate from 2000 to 2006 and that was the period following the Ellen [DeGeneres] cover story in Time magazine," he said. "If a famous person came out, we would put them on the cover. It was a big deal. I remember in 2012, when Jim Parsons was still on "The Big Bang Theory" and he came out, it was in like the 18th paragraph of an article in The New York Times, so it has become less of a stop-the-presses moment."

But in 1968, when the Production Code (governing "offensive content" in movies) was over, Duralde said it lead to groundbreaking films like "The Boys in the Band."

"That was like nothing else American movies had ever seen before," he explained, mentioning another film, "The Killing of Sister George" from around that same time period.

"The fact that we can also have Hallmark movies starring Luke MacFarlane and Jonathan Bennett playing gay characters is an amount of progress I would never have imagined when I started watching Hallmark movies," he said.

Duralde called writing "Hollywood Pride" a series of discoveries.

"Just in the people I didn't know and the nitty-gritty of how all this played out in the film industry, whether it's in the films that were made or the studio rules about how people lived and presented their lives in public," he explained. "I hope that people have their own discoveries along the way."

He continued, "We just can't sit on our laurels or feel too comfortable because it's always very easy [for others] to decide that we're the enemy. So it is with both optimism and a sense of trepidation that I look at the future and I hope that we learn things from our successes."