Sick and Dirty

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

De: Michael Koresky

Narrado por: Robin Speare

"An absorbing landmark of film criticism.” --The Chicago Tribune, "The 10 Best Books of the Year"

AN ALLSTORA'S QUEER HISTORY 101 BOOK CLUB PICK

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.©2025 Michael Koresky (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Labored and laborious

Robin Speare has that tone of a man reading an exam question aloud to a bored lecture hall… each sentence treated like a chore, each chapter as if he’s counting the minutes until he can flee for a sandwich. That professorial detachment works for textbooks, not for a story dripping with sex, danger, coded language, and velvet-lined subversion.

And Koresky, well, he’s no Leamer. His intentions are noble, but the prose plods. It has the pace of a man carrying armfuls of research notes and trying not to drop any. He gets trapped in his own admiration for the era, circling the ideas rather than letting them flare. There’s almost a terror of letting the material breathe. It’s like watching someone describe a nightclub through a spreadsheet.

Which is why Suddenly Last Summer becomes the only part that wakes up. Tennessee Williams doesn’t do dull. That play is all heatstroke, menace, cannibalistic metaphor, and the sound of polite society screaming under its own silverware. The movie’s dance around the Hays Code is half the fun...a masterclass in implication so sharp it slices through the censorship without ever naming its sin. Elizabeth Taylor in white, talking about the boys on the beach… those scenes feel alive because Williams wrote in electricity and Joseph Mankiewicz filmed it like a confession.

Compared to that, Koresky’s wider argument feels anaemic. And Speare’s delivery? It’s like he’s allergic to innuendo. The story needed someone who could roll those sentences in their mouth, savour the forbidden textures, play with the shadows. Instead you got a narrator who reads queer Hollywood like he’s announcing train times.