Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall: Amazon.ca: Richard Barrios: Books

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A finely nuanced analysis of how gays and lesbians were presented on screen from the 1920s through the 1970s. -- G.M. Kramer, Lambda Book Report
Richard Barrios has turned his amused, intelligent eye to the depiction of gay men and lesbians in pre-Stonewall Hollywood films...Barrios has compiled hundreds of queer cinematic examples, from the little-known Algie, the Miner (1912) to the iconic The Boys in the Band (1970). His comments are shrewd and his coverage complete. Following up on Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet, Screened Out reminds us that film has continued to hold up its strange mirror-alternately reflecting, repressing, ridiculing, suggesting, condemning, questioning, and even, on occasion, accepting. -- Reed Woodhouse, outFront Books
Building on the legacy of The Celluloid Closet , Barrios manages to be both encyclopedic and breezy; taking the reader on a comfortable and well documented tour of 20th century American screen images of homosexuality. Screened Out is must-have for film buffs and queer buffs and will be the standard reference work and source for all future work in this area. -- Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay
Screened Out is a comprehensive and lucidly written contribution to the history of queer images in Hollywood films, rich in sharp analysis and fresh perspectives. It is also a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of the cultural climate leading up to the Stonewall riots, which ushered in the modern gay rights movement. An important book and a terrific resource. -- Michelangelo Signorile, Author or Queen in America
Exhaustive and well-researched, as well as a compulsively fun read. -- Marrit Ingman, The Austin Chronicle
Along the way, [Barrios] introduces some wonderfully oddball films that will be heating up my VCR. -- Steve Weinstein, New York Blade News
Barrios's work here is invaluable, and more necessary than ever before...By giving this history of queer images in mainstream American culture, Barrios has illuminated the present as well as the past. -- Michael Bronski, ThePhoenix.com

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Rapacious dykes, self-loathing closet cases, hustlers, ambiguous sophisticates, and sadomasochistic rich kids: most of what America thought it knew about gay people it learned at the movies. A fresh and revelatory look at sexuality in the Great Age of movie making, Screened Out shows how much gay and lesbian lives have shaped the Big Screen. Spanning popular American cinema from the 1900s until today, distinguished film historian Richard Barrios presents a rich, compulsively readable analysis of how Hollywood has used and depicted gays and the mixed signals it has given us: Marlene in a top hat, Cary Grant in a negligee, a pansy cowboy in The Dude Wrangler. Such iconoclastic images, Barrios argues, send powerful messages about tragedy and obsession, but also about freedom and compassion, even empowerment.

Mining studio records, scripts, drafts (including cut scenes), censor notes, reviews, and recollections of viewers, Barrios paints our fullest picture yet of how gays and lesbians were portrayed by the dream factory, warning that we shouldn't congratulate ourselves quite so much on the progress movies - and the real world -- have made since Stonewall.

Captivating, myth-breaking, and funny, Screened Out is for all film aficionados and for anyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and drawn strength and a sense of identity from what they saw on screen, no matter how fleeting or coded.

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First Sentence
The movies and gayness have had oddly parallel lives these past hundred years. Read the first page

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5.0 out of 5 stars Screen out the world, and read!, Aug 13 2003

By

Carolyn Paetow (Proctorville, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (Hardcover)

For those interested in cinematic homosexuality, this book is simply a must-have! Composed with a liberal touch of arch lingua franca, the volume is toned and textured with as many gossipy asides, innuendos, and double entendres as the films discussed. The subject is dealt a much lighter hand than Vito Russo allotted its predecessor, The Celluloid Closet. Richard Barrios is utterly tickled pink at his discoveries, where Russo often seems to chafe. Even those familiar with the torturous course of outre theater will detect tidbits previously unperceived, and those not in-the-know will probably be astonished at pre-Production Code permissiveness regarding the depiction of fey/butch images. More remarkable is the under-the-radar, Code-busting bomblettes that went unsensed by the censors--and were subsequently reviled (or reveled in) by trade reviewers. A tad too much quill is sharpened criticizing fluffy, Day-class sixties comedies, when such goose down is found in every film era. (At least the author can be commended for not reading too much into Calamity Jane--or any other feature, for that matter. After all, a lesbian cult movie does not a lesbian movie make!) Barrios could also have refrained from the occasional canard regarding sexual orientation origins and Biblical history. Overall, though, this substantial book sticks solidly to the subject, examining numerous films (including shorts and cartoons) and their interrelationship with the political establishment and popular culture. Included are over 50 crisp photos and several vignette-bios. The prose has a fabulous flow that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read and should hold the attention of anyone interested in the screen/society circle.

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Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Screen out the world, and read!, Aug 13 2003

By Carolyn Paetow - Published on Amazon.com

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (Hardcover)

For those interested in cinematic homosexuality, this book is simply a must-have! Composed with a liberal touch of arch lingua franca, the volume is toned and textured with as many gossipy asides, innuendos, and double entendres as the films discussed. The subject is dealt a much lighter hand than Vito Russo allotted its predecessor, The Celluloid Closet. Richard Barrios is utterly tickled pink at his discoveries, where Russo often seems to chafe. Even those familiar with the torturous course of outre theater will detect tidbits previously unperceived, and those not in-the-know will probably be astonished at pre-Production Code permissiveness regarding the depiction of fey/butch images. More remarkable is the under-the-radar, Code-busting bomblettes that went unsensed by the censors--and were subsequently reviled (or reveled in) by trade reviewers. A tad too much quill is sharpened criticizing fluffy, Day-class sixties comedies, when such goose down is found in every film era. (At least the author can be commended for not reading too much into Calamity Jane--or any other feature, for that matter. After all, a lesbian cult movie does not a lesbian movie make!) Barrios could also have refrained from the occasional canard regarding sexual orientation origins and Biblical history. Overall, though, this substantial book sticks solidly to the subject, examining numerous films (including shorts and cartoons) and their interrelationship with the political establishment and popular culture. Included are over 50 crisp photos and several vignette-bios. The prose has a fabulous flow that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read and should hold the attention of anyone interested in the screen/society circle.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Screened Out - revealing and a great read., Jan 14 2007

By Douglas Weatherford "uncledougie" - Published on Amazon.com

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This review is from: Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (Hardcover)

This literate, well written and fascinating history of the subtle and not so subtle portrayals of the gay and lesbian sensibility in Hollywood films, is comprehensive and endlessly informative and perceptive. Anyone with the slightest interest in film subtext and the wryly subversive nature which filmmakers can exhibit in their work (often under the radar of the studio brass) will find Richard Barrios a terrfic guide thorough the minefield of how Hollywood made pictures. From Clifton Webb to Marlene Dietrich, from antiques like "The Broadway Melody" to instant relics like "The Boys in the Band," the examples offered will stimulate the interest to reinvestigate many old film titles, and subsequently enrich the experience of watching them with a new perspective.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything in the Garden, Aug 1 2008

By Kevin Killian - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (Paperback)

This book deserves five stars just for its research alone, but it has to be said that Barrios grows steadily sourer as the present era starts riding in, like the tide. He doesn't like any show made after 1958 or so, and if you ask me, one of Doris Day's furry best friends must have escaped her palatial pet shelter in Carmel, and bitten Richard Barrios on theass, for there's no other explanation for his vitriol against the Doris Day Rock Hudson movies of the early 60s. Okay, okay, they were inane, but they did not cause cancer! And sometimes he seems unable to explain the results of his research, but unwilling to admit it, so he just blathers on covering his tracks. Maybe spends too much time following market trends (and yet this proved such a fruitful field in his previous book, A SONG IN THE DARK, about the early movie musicals of the late 20s and early 30s)? No one can really explain why so many of the big studio films of the CHILDRENS HOUR/ADVISE AND CONSENT period tanked at the box office, but Barrios just keeps doggedly analyzing and re-analyzing what went wrong.

In every other respect, the book is unforgettably brilliant and, even when I disagree with his conclusions about this or that film, I respect his opinion and I admire the way he writes it up. (Okay, except for Hitchcock's ROPE, much more sympathetic a film than he gives it credit for.) Barrios' style, or banter, is generally persuasive and amusing, and he can summarize the plot of a bad film faster than an old fashioned telegram by Gertrude Stein. And when it comes time for an aria, he really knows how to let go--such as his extended tribute to the "Naked Moon" scene in Cecil B. De Mille's THE SIGN OF THE CROSS.

Book is punctuated by individual star portraits in prose, of Franklin Pangborn, Cecil Cunningham, Clifton Webb, and most hilariously, Bugs Bunny, whose manic androgyny and brattiness finally get their due here. He has gone through the files of the Breen office, the Hays office, every memo Geoffrey Shurlock ever wrote, and he has pored through multiple drafts of studio screenplays to find out how same-sex encodement was pre-censored by officious agencies. They still do this, only nowadays they call it "market research," and Barrios points out how it's the same old story watching Russell Crowe in A BEAUTIFUL MIND, the strands of gay sexuality in the original material as calculatedly snipped out as they were in NIGHT AND DAY or WORDS AND MUSIC. Can't wait to see what Mr. Barrios writes next.

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Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall [Hardcover]

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