Michael Koresky has already had a busy year.
In April, the filmmaker and movie critic was promoted to senior curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, the prestigious institution in Queens, New York; he was previously the museum’s editorial director. He still teaches college and works with the Criterion Collection, the much-beloved video label that restores and distributes important films from both the past and present.
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And Koresky has published his latest book, “Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness.” In the book, he examines films with queer subtexts made in the Golden Age of Hollywood, including the Alfred Hitchcock-directed “Rope” and two films, “These Three” and “The Children’s Hour,” based on Lillian Hellman’s acclaimed stage play, “Tea and Sympathy.” Under the Hays Code, the infamous guidelines that forced filmmakers to censor themselves, explicitly queer content wasn’t allowed on the silver screen.
“Too often we’ve looked back at these movies from a contemporary vantage, as though trying to make them out through an obscuring lattice of dead tree branches,” Koresky writes in the book. “Clean out the bramble of the past — and whatever superiority we may feel as modern viewers — and these movies reveal themselves as bracing and vital, allowing us to see our pasts, and therefore ourselves, more clearly.”
Koresky discussed his book via Zoom from his home in New York. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q: In the book, you mention Vito Russo’s 1981 book, “The Celluloid Closet,” which also explored how queer people were represented in film. Was that an impetus for your own book?
I would say it gave me something to wrestle with. I’m not going to say “work against,” because it’s such an important book and I don’t want it to sound like I’m critiquing it. I just feel like it’s been a long time. It’s been 40 years, and I had been thinking about writing a book on American queer cinema for a long time. The impetus for writing it was just accumulating ideas that I’ve had over the years through my Criterion series that I do, “Queersighted.” I realized all the movies that I want to write about, I’m fascinated by on aesthetic, moral, and philosophical levels.
“The Celluloid Closet” was something that’s meant a lot to me for a long time, so it was a little tricky to figure out how to wrestle with the text. I have a lot of different feelings about it. Obviously, my feelings about Vito Russo are unambiguous. I think he’s a hero. I think the research that he did laid the groundwork for everything we do, but I also just felt that these movies haven’t been discussed in a way that is more nuanced in a really long time.
Q: Of the movies you write about in the book, do you remember the first ones that you saw?
“A Star Is Born” would have been the first one that I saw. I was probably like 8 or 9. I loved really long musicals as a kid, and my mom was a film buff, and she had great taste in movies. And of course, I was already into Judy Garland because of “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “The Wizard of Oz.” I remember my mom bringing home “A Star Is Born.” This was in the ‘80s, so it had just come out on videotape for the first time. I was mesmerized by it, and I was so overwhelmed by the ending. It’s such an adult film, but it really hit me on a level that I could get as a kid.
Q: Do you remember any of the first contemporary queer movies that you saw that affected you when you were growing up?
I was born in 1979, so throughout the ‘80s there was really nothing much that would’ve penetrated the house. The only thing I can remember seeing young that I watched a lot was “The Color Purple,” which is a queer film in a sense. Obviously, the content’s diluted from Alice Walker’s novel, and it got a lot of criticism for that. But there’s a real tenderness and beauty in the kiss between Whoopi Goldberg and Margaret Avery, and there is a genuine feeling of kind of non-normative love in that film. I was obsessed with that movie. I used to watch it over and over again, and then I would cry so uncontrollably at the end. There was also “A Chorus Line.” When the movie came out, it was also heavily criticized for altering the source material. But frankly, a movie that has outwardly queer people having monologues about their gay lives is pretty radical.
Q: You write about the two film adaptations of “The Children’s Hour” in the book. Do you think the audiences seeing those films at the time, specifically the ones who were not familiar with the play, were likely to pick up on the queer subtext?
I think some people always have, and some people always will. No matter how much production codes or governments try to squash queer lives, we’ll always be there, and we’ll always be able to read between the lines and know what’s there. They didn’t get demographics back then. Even if anyone had admitted to being gay, they weren’t coming out of a theater and crossing off a box and saying, “This is why I came to this movie, and these are my perspectives.” But we do know that queer people existed, even though Hollywood said we didn’t, and they were going to the movies. I truly believe they were reading between the lines, no matter how much they tried to take that out of the marketing.
Q: Do you think that the people who were enforcing the Hays Code were aware that there were still movies being made with queer themes, even if they weren’t explicit? The subtext in “Rope” and “Tea and Sympathy”would seem kind of hard to miss.
“Tea and Sympathy” was the most contentious of all these, the back and forth with the Production Code Administration was so much and went on for so many years. They were so terrified of the gay content of that film. They were super aware of the gay content; they didn’t want that movie to be made. So it was basically, “Take this out, change this.” And they somehow thought that they had gotten all the words out, so by the time that it was made, it would be not clear to the audience, which is ridiculous because it’s the entire point of the plot. The entire point of the plot is to kind of deconstruct heterosexist society and the way that masculinity is prized above all, and it’s so sympathetic to its non-normative protagonist that you can’t really take that out of the plot because that’s what it’s all about.
They kept trying and trying when they detected it, but then they would often fail. You can’t watch “Tea and Sympathy” or “Suddenly, Last Summer” or “Rope” today without realizing these things. So a lot of stuff ended up getting through, and the filmmakers did it in subtle ways. “Rope” is a great example, because so many people who worked on it were gay, whether it’s the writer, Arthur Laurents, or whether it’s the stars, Farley Granger and John Dall. [Alfred] Hitchcock himself was not gay, but was fascinated by any kind of non-normative sexuality. So he tried everything he could to get that back into the movie, which is a rare case for these films.