Gloria Holden as "Dracula's Daughter," Judith Anderson as the ominous Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's "Rebecca," and Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo in "The Maltese Falcon," begin a long line of movie characters in which subtle hints of homosexuality are used to make villains more menacing.
"The guys that ran that Code weren't rocket scientists," Jay Presson Allen recalls. "They missed a lot of stuff, and if a director was subtle enough, and clever enough, they got around it."
"I don't think the censors at that time realized that this was about gay people," says Arthur Laurents of Hitchcock's film "Rope", for which Laurents wrote the screenplay, based on the true story of gay psychopathic murderers Leopold and Loeb.
While Rope star Farley Granger makes it clear that the actors knew they were playing gay characters, Laurents thinks the censors "didn't have a clue what was and what wasn't. That's how it got by."
By the early fifties, lesbians are suggested on the screen by tough bulldykes behind bars ("Caged") or as a troublesome neurotic (Lauren Bacall in "Young Man With a Horn").
"These women were a warning to ladies," explains Allen, "to just watch it and get back to the kitchen, where God meant them to be." The fifties were a time of sexual conformity; for men, masculinity ruled.
The tension between sensitivity and masculinity was represented on the screen by characters who are accused of being gay (Tom Lee in "Tea and Sympathy"); or by characters who seemed to be gay (Sal Mineo as Plato in "Rebel Without a Cause").
For gay movie-goers in those repressed years, these were the images that spoke to them. "Rebel" screenwriter Stewart Stern acknowledges a gay reading of the movie: "Any film is at the same time an expression of a writer, and it's an offering to an audience to create their own film."
Gore Vidal explains, "You got very good at projecting subtext without saying a word about what you were doing." Using his experiences as a screenwriter of "Ben-Hur", Vidal illustrates how a writer, working together with the director and an actor, can hint at a gay relationship even in a biblical epic.