Sick and Dirty

Sick and Dirty

Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness

Michael Koresky
Bloomsbury 2025
ISBN 9781639732548

Hardcover, 320 pp.
247.7 X 6.8 X 27.9 inches | 1.2 pounds

A blazingly original history celebrating the persistence of queerness onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the dark days of the Hollywood Production Code.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code severely restricted what Hollywood cinema could depict. This included “any inference” of the lives of homosexuals. In a landmark 1981 book, gay activist Vito Russo famously condemned Hollywood's censorship regime, lambasting many midcentury films as the bigoted products of a “celluloid closet.”

But there is more to these movies than meets the eye. In this insightful, wildly entertaining book, cinema historian Michael Koresky finds new meaning in "problematic” classics of the Code era like Hitchcock's Rope, Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy, and-bookending the period and anchoring Koresky's narrative-William Wyler's two adaptations of The Children's Hour, Lillian Hellman's provocative hit play about a pair of schoolteachers accused of lesbianism.

Lifting up the underappreciated queer filmmakers, writers, and actors of the era, Koresky finds artists who are long overdue for reevaluation. Through his brilliant inquiry, Sick and Dirty reveals the “bad seeds” of queer cinema to be surprisingly, even gleefully subversive, reminding us, in an age of book bans and gag laws, that nothing makes queerness speak louder than its opponents' bids to silence it.

Michael Koresky is Senior Curator of Film at New York's Museum of the Moving Image and a member of the National Society of Film Critics. Previously he held editorial roles with Film at Lincoln Center and the Criterion Collection, where he continues to host and curate the Criterion Channel series Queersighted. He has taught at NYU and The New School, and his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, the Village Voice, Film Quarterly, and other publications. He is the author of Films of Endearment and a monograph on the British director Terence Davies.