The Celluloid Closet (1995)
“What happened, of course, in the 20s and 30s when they got very raunchy the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestants came down hard. The big change occurred when the movie moguls got together.”
They found an outsider in the form of Indiana politician Will Hays who set up the Motion Picture Production Code.
“Will Hays would head the movies’ first voluntary effort at self-censorship. The early Hays code was a token gesture, seldom taken seriously. But by 1934, the Catholic Church had devised a scheme of its own. The Legion of Decency not only rated movies as to content but threatened massive boycotts. Hollywood promised to play by the rules.”
“Code director Joe Breen ran Hollywood’s censorship machinery for over two decades. He was authorized to change words, personalities and plots. A novel about a sexually-confused alcoholic became a movie about an alcoholic with writer’s block. A novel about gay bashing and murder became a movie about anti-semitism and murder.”
“For all its efforts, the production code didn’t erase homosexuals from screens.
It just made them harder to find. Now they had a new identity… as cold-blooded villains.”
This documentary really needs an update to talk about the recent developments. We’re finally at a point as a community when we’re not just surviving. We’re not hiding anymore and we can find each other and come together like religious groups used to do in order to boycott us. We’re fighting for a reversal of censorship and I think it’s important that people know Hollywood was on some level always willing and wanting to tell our stories. It’s important to know where we come from. It’s important to explain that you cannot call a group of people delusional because they perceive something that was invented to be invisible in the first place. We really need people to know more about our histories and we need to learn as much as possible about our own history in order to make our points.
kianamaiart
baratheonpilled
gummygunk
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
stormborns
prguitarman
izzy806
