TCM celebrates Pride Month by devoting daytime programming to actors and actresses who are icons to the LGBTQ community. Some were out in their lifetimes. Some were outed after death. The sexuality of others is still hotly debated. Wherever they fall on the Kinsey scale, these are stars whose on-screen images and/or private lives have endeared them to an audience whose devotion is both fierce and knowledgeable.
Friday, June 11, the focus is on female icons:
Patsy Kelly, the pioneering comedienne who came out in the press in the 1930s, teams with Lyda Roberti, her co-star in a series of Hal Roach comedy shorts, as a pair of daffy nurses in Nobody’s Baby (1937). When Kelly had trouble finding work because of her sexuality and drinking problems, she worked as personal assistant to…
Tallulah Bankhead, who, even without rumors about her sexuality, became a gay icon because of her outsized personality, on display as a socialite who squanders her fortune in Faithless (1932).
Dolores Del Rio’s beauty has obsessed LGBTQ audiences for decades, as have rumors that she hosted get togethers for the “sewing circle,” an alleged group of bisexual Hollywood women. She stars as Madame Du Barry (1934) in a lavish biography of the infamous French courtesan.
Lilyan Tashman was a gifted comedienne and noted clotheshorse. Later biographers have suggested both she and husband Edmund Lowe were gay. That makes the title of her 1930 vehicle The Matrimonial Bed rather ironic. She stars as a society woman who remarries after her husband’s death, only to find he’s still alive but suffering amnesia.
Kay Francis was another noted clotheshorse and an underappreciated actress. One of her biographers claimed to have deciphered her coded diaries to reveal her notes on numerous dalliances with men and women. Her reputation as a Play Girl (1941) adds extra interest to her casting as a fading gold digger.
Greta Garbo’s penchant for wearing pants and her reclusiveness have fueled rumors for years, but it’s her acting that has brought her legions of faithful fans. She had, perhaps, her finest hour in Camille (1936), with George Cukor directing her as the doomed courtesan making one last stab at love with the young Robert Taylor.
Marlene Dietrich rose to stardom as the image of exotic sexuality in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), in which she lures staid professor Emil Janning to his downfall. Her affairs with men like Gary Cooper and James Stewart were legendary. She dallied with women, too, as recounted by her daughter, Maria Riva, and other biographers.
On Monday, June 28, the 52nd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that marked the birth of the gay liberation movement, the focus on icons shifts to men:
Rock Hudson and James Dean co-star as rival ranchers in George Stevens’ epic of Texas history Giant (1956), with Elizabeth Taylor co-starring as Hudson’s wife. Hudson was famously outed when he became one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS-related complications. Dean’s sexuality has been more hotly debated, with some claiming he was bisexual. Regardless, both stars have been embraced by gay audiences for decades.
Roddy McDowall never came out during his lifetime, and his closest friends have respected his privacy since his death. An outstanding child actor, he never really went through an awkward phase, though he was forced into low-budget films like the anti-Communist thriller The Steel Fist (1952) before leaving Hollywood to work on stage in the 1950s. He also retained close friendships with some of Hollywood’s most glamorous leading ladies, including Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner and Lauren Bacall.
Farley Granger spilled all about his affairs with men and women in his memoir, Include Me Out. The title is one of the famous malapropisms credited to independent producer Sam Goldwyn, who made Granger a star in his own productions and loaned him to other studios for pictures like Anthony Mann’s 1950 film noir Side Street, co-starring another Goldwyn star, Cathy O’Donnell.
Van Johnson was MGM’s premier all-American boy in the 1940s and 1950s, teamed frequently with June Allyson. His homosexuality was well-known in Hollywood but kept quiet by his home studio, MGM. Even when he was outed in stepson Ned Wynn’s 1992 memoir, We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills, Johnson kept quiet about it. That gives an extra charge to his casting as a TV children’s show host threatened by a tabloid editor out to reveal a secret from his past in Slander (1957).
Dirk Bogarde was another star who stayed in the closet his entire life, never mentioning his true relationship to partner Anthony Forwood in nine volumes of his autobiography. But he also refused to enter a marriage of convenience, which may have prevented his becoming as big a star in Hollywood as he was in his native England. He stars as a British nobleman and war veteran accused of being an imposter in Libel (1959), with Olivia de Havilland as his wife.
Marlon Brando had three wives and fathered several children but also claimed to have had homosexual affairs in a 1976 interview. Audiences still value the intense sexuality of his early performances in films like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Wild One (1953) while also acknowledging his prodigious gifts as an actor. He stars as a wandering musician involved with a frustrated Italian-American shopkeeper (Anna Magnani) in Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), adapted from Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending.
Montgomery Clift was rumored to be involved with Elizabeth Taylor when they co-starred for the first of three times in A Place in the Sun (1951). She soon realized he preferred men, but they remained fierce friends the rest of his life, and she was the first person to discuss his homosexuality publicly at the GLAAD Media Awards in 2000. In their last film together, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) with Katharine Hepburn, he’s a psychiatrist trying to help Taylor remember the circumstances surrounding the murder of Hepburn’s gay son. This was the first film to deal overtly with homosexuality while the topic was still forbidden under Hollywood’s self-censoring Production Code.
