"It's amazing," says Susie Bright, "how if you're a gay audience and you're accustomed to crumbs, how you will watch an entire movie just to see somebody wear an outfit that you think means that they're homosexual."
Doris Day dressed as a man and singing "Secret Love"as "Calamity Jane;" a very butch Joan Crawford challenging a very butch Mercedes McCambridge in "Johnny Guitar;" Montgomery Clift and John Ireland admiring each others' guns in "Red River;" Gloria Grahame getting worked on by a big butch masseuse in "In a Lonely Place;" tough guy Glenn Ford's flirtatious relationship with his effete employer in "Gilda"
"Gay audiences [were] desperate to find something," according to Arthur Laurents. "I think all minority audiences watch movies with hope: they hope they will see what they want to see. That's why nobody really sees the same movie." Richard Dyer, reflecting on the movies of this period, finds parallels with what it was like for gay people in the real world: "We could only express ourselves indirectly, just as people on the screen could only express themselves indirectly... the characters are in the closet, the movie is in the closet, and we were in the closet."
But as gay screenwriter Paul Rudnick argues, "you can't keep gay life, gay behavior out of the movies. It's like keeping it out of life in general -- so it sort of pops up, often in somewhat hidden, or somewhat coded ways." Comedies, in particular, have often found ways to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior, precisely because they're not to be taken seriously.
"In the film of 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,'" Rudnick continues, "there's a gym full of bodybuilders who have absolutely no interest in Jane Russell" -- singing "Ain't There Anyone Here For Love?" Sissy characters survived in such comedies as" Lover, Come Back," in which Doris Day is confounded by a decorator's insistence on a lilac floor for a kitchen.
And gay author Armistead Maupin recalls watching Rock Hudson - Doris Day movies with a group of gay men in Hudson's screening room, and enjoying the "gay in-jokes occurring in almost all of those light comedies." In "Pillow Talk," for example, "the character that Rock Hudson played posed as gay in order to get a woman into bed. It was tremendously ironic, because here was a gay man impersonating a straight man impersonating a gay man."
Tony Curtis describes how our ambiguous sexuality, "that kind of sexuality of ours that overlaps -- some like it hard, some like it soft..." was subtly exploited in Billy Wilder's drag opus with Curtis and Jack Lemmon, "Some Like It Hot." When Lemmon, disguised as Daphne, tries to convince Osgood (Joe E Brown) that they can't get married because Lemmon is really a man, Osgood is unfazed. "Well," he declares, "nobody's perfect."