For example, silent screen stars Edmund Lowe and Lilyan Tashman, both homosexual, deflected suspicion about their sexuality by marrying each other and then publicized their wedded “bliss” in fan magazines such as the June 1929 Photoplay, which featured them in an article entitled “How to Hold a Husband/Wife in Hollywood.” Similarly, lesbian silent film star Alla Nazimova lived in a lavender tandem with gay actor Charles Bryant, and, as Gavin Lambert shows in his illustrated biography Nazimova, the two posed often for publicity pictures, Nazimova sitting on Bryant’s lap or, in another photo, looking up at him in romantic adoration. However, if this were true, the “front marriage,” in which a gay person married a person of the opposite sex to pass as straight, and the “lavender tandem,” a marriage between a gay man and a lesbian so that both might pass as heterosexual, would not have been the common phenomenon that it was in Hollywood in the 1920’s and 30’s. He suggests that in the 1920’s and 30’s, fan magazines often featured articles such as the one on homosexual actor William Haines, about whom it was stated, “He has never been in love with any girl yet, and doesn’t intend to.” Abrams argues that the public clearly understood such statements to mean that the star was homosexual, and he claims that the fans’ recognition of this fact had no negative effect on an actor’s career.
He also includes a number of photographs, notably a stunningly romantic picture of Randolph Scott lighting Cary Grant’s cigarette, the two men leaning toward each other intimately with the Pacific Ocean in the background.Ībrams’ arguments-particularly his insistence that Hollywood was not intent on hiding information about the homosexuality of stars, and that homosexuality was even presented in a “positive light”-are interesting but insufficiently nuanced and, in the face of much other evidence, ultimately not persuasive. In addition to examining the era’s fan magazines, gossip columns, and long-forgotten films, Abrams discusses several little-known novels that were written between 19 and set in Hollywood. Randolph Scott and Cary Grant in the late 1930’sĪbrams declares in his introduction that Hollywood Bohemians differs from previous scholarly writing about homosexuality in Hollywood, which insisted that “the people running Hollywood generally suppressed information about homosexuals.” In contrast, he promises to show that “images of adulterers, homosexuals, and cross dressers appeared in a much more positive light” in movies and novels about Hollywood.
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They made America more tolerant, as well: fans were forced to examine their prejudices when they read in newspaper gossip columns or movie magazines such as Photoplay that their favorite celebrities engaged in unconventional behavior. Abrams argues that not only did they contribute significantly to the construction of Hollywood’s image as the most racy and unconventional place in the country they also helped to promote the movie industry by offering fans the vicarious thrill of culturally taboo behavior.
HOLLYWOOD BOHEMIANS is about homosexuals and, to a lesser extent, heterosexuals that Brett Abrams describes as “adulterous,” who were in the movie industry during the years 1917 to 1941. Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream