“The Celluloid Closet”

I remember watching The Celluloid Closet pirated in quarters off YouTube back in 2015 when I was a junior or senior in high school, having just come out as gay myself as well as a lifelong classic film geek. When I watched the documentary in high school, I remember experiencing a kind of thrill to see classic film tropes such as “the pansy” or simply femmy swishy movements performed by men on the silver screen. Being a little sheltered queer 16 year old, I had never really (up till that point) had any sense of the history of queer people and especially in Hollywood on movie screens. The idea of queer coding and signing was rather revelatory to me, and it was rather inspiring to see this overwhelming treasure trove of queer soaked imagery of usually gay and lesbian people. Equally inspiring was seeing many actors I beloved as well as towering queer figures I was just beginning to become familiar with such as Quentin Crisp and Harvey Fierstein talk about queer history and queer imagery with such specificity and candor. The film hit me as dated when I viewed it in high school, but watching it again now it strikes me much more as a wonderful time capsule that gives a lovely visual review of queer imagery in Hollywood within the 20th century. It was depressing then and depressing now again to view and consider how brutally queer characters were historically killed or corrected within the history of Hollywood. However, as the film makes the point of as it closes, I think there have been incredible strides in queer representation on screens across the globe. This movement in queer cinema (such as the eponymous New Queer Cinema movement in the 80s and 90s) cannot however be attributed to Hollywood but to the queer voices and artists that have been brave enough and lucky enough to speak and work outside of the system. Today, I believe the most diverse expressions of queer personhood can be found through television as streaming platforms have the luxury of producing an extremely wide array of stories. Reality television more than anything as well as documentary film have brought the real stories of queer people into people’s living rooms. Looking back to Hollywood, even a film such as Brokeback Mountain being released back in the mid-2000s was met with enormous critical and commercial controversy, was snubbed by the Academy, and features the death of one of the film’s queer protagonists. The Celluloid Closet is a fantastic capsule of gay signing and indirect queerness on screens, but it is significant and wonderful that film has progressed since this point in time.