His book was a compendium of visible and concealed gays in the movies, and now this documentary, which shows the scenes he could only describe, makes it clear Hollywood wanted it both ways: It benefitted from the richness that gays added to films, but didn't want to acknowledge their sexuality.
You ever had a Swiss watch?” “The Celluloid Closet” is inspired by a 1981 book by Vito Russo, who wrote as a gay man who found he had to look in the shadows and subtexts of movies to find the homosexual characters who were surely there. Hollywood knew who was gay and who was not, and there were in-jokes like John Ireland's line to Montgomery Clift in “ Red River”: “There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun-a Swiss watch, or a woman from anywhere. Yet gays were everywhere in the movies, right from the beginning-this documentary shows two men dancing together in a Thomas Edison short named “The Gay Brothers,” from 1895-and often they were hidden in plain view.
Portrayals of homosexuality were frowned upon until the 1960s, by the movie industry's production code and such groups as the Legion of Decency.
