The Celluloid Closet

The Celluloid Closet

For more than 100 years，mainstream Hollywood films largely shunned gay subjects, which were disregarded, closeted, or dealt with by independent filmmaker. However, homosexuality, or the suggestion of it，has been with US since the movies were born, and in general, the stereotypical imagery of gays was not a pretty picture: it was usually a sissy stereotype, a tragic neurotic, or even a psychotic criminal (Benshoff and Griffin 2006).

In the movie, The Celluloid Closet, it analyzes the effects which Hollywood films give to gays in and how the gay people look at themselves. Historians said during early days，movies showed few depictions of gays or lesbians because they largely kept to themselves and Were ignored by mainstream society. The popular conceptions identified homosexuality as an inversion of ordinary gender：women in men's bodies，men in women's．Hence popular at this time, from the 1890s to the 1930s, was Hollywood's most enduring stereotype, the sissy, something that can be signaled immediately，in the flick of a wrist or a rapid sashay. It was not a threatening representation of gays because he occupied a middle ground between masculinity and femininity. Such a character was often presented as an object of ridicule and laugher, appearing mainly in the domain of farce and comedy. However such freedom would be short-lived. After the 1930s, even images like effeminate pansy could not be represented as freely as before. The Church hierarchy, conservative politicians, and women's groups had been protesting the movies permissiveness throughout the 20s and 30s, lobbying for federal censorship of the movies. Then in 1934 there came the