Naming Gay Names In Hollywood

The late film historian Vito Russo, in his marvelous book, The Celluloid Closet, had this to say about the mindset of film executives: "The movies await permission from the world-famous general public before they will portray gays as a fact of life. And the self-hatred of gays in the film industry is as much at fault as the ignorance of the general public."

With that in mind, a book proposal by Martin Strong (a pseudonym) is circulating through the New York book publishing world, looking for a home. This proposal, if and when it is expanded into a book-length work, will really shake up Hollywood, from top to bottom. No pun intended. It'll undoubtedly be a runaway best-seller.

It purports to name names. In a word, to out gay writers, directors, producers, and actors. The Scandal of Homosexual Hollywood, as the proposal is called, will also have "a list of straight production crew types and publicists," says the New York Daily News, "who find it hard to get work because of, among other things, their sexual persuasion."

Strong, a former TV director, has been gathering information about Hollywood's closeted gays for ten years.

This unpublished Mediawatch article was written in November 1991.

(A search on Google and Amazon.com did not list this title. Apparently the book was never published.)

An Overlooked Gay Movie Couple

In Celluloid Activist, Michael Schiavi's biography of gay film scholar Vito Russo, he points out that "Orson Welles's latest movie The Stranger opened the weekend of Vito's birth [in July 1946]."

This film about a Nazi war criminal (Welles) hiding out in a small Connecticut town has a scene mid-film in which two young men briefly appear. Edward G. Robinson, the FBI agent hunting for Welles's character, enters Mr. Potter's store. As Robinson seats himself at the lunch counter, these two men (obviously gay) leave the counter and exit the scene. Each man has a lustful smile on his face. Their exit happens so quickly, the censors back then probably missed it.

More importantly, Russo doesn't mention this scene in The Celluloid Closet. Maybe he missed it like I did the first few times I saw it on television.