Queersighted: Sick and Dirty

Queersighted: Sick and Dirty

2 Episodes

“Sexual perversion, and any inference to it, is strictly forbidden.” Thus spoke the Hollywood Production Code, the system of censorship that defined the limits of the permissible during the studio system’s golden age from the 1930s to the ’60s. According to such dictates, queer people simply didn’t exist. Nevertheless, during the decades of the Code at its most draconian, movies with gay and lesbian themes, undercurrents, and unmistakable desire made it to the screen. The new book “Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness,” by Queersighted series programmer Michael Koresky, takes a close look at this history. In this conversation, Koresky invites author Mark Harris (“Pictures at a Revolution”) to discuss a selection of classic films from this rich, complicated period in American cinema, in which writers like Tennessee Williams (CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF; SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER), and directors such as Dorothy Arzner (DANCE, GIRL, DANCE) and Vincente Minnelli (TEA AND SYMPATHY) left a subversive, unmistakably queer mark on their films despite the Code.

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Queersighted: Sick and Dirty
  • Queersighted: Sick and Dirty

    Episode 1

  • These Three

    Episode 2

    Directed by William Wyler • 1936 • United States
    Starring Miriam Hopkins, Merle Oberon, Joel McCrea

    Performed to perfection by a top-flight cast, the first of William Wyler’s two adaptations of Lillian Hellman’s controversial stage play THE CHILDREN’S HOUR sidesteps the story’s then-explosive le...