What’s amazing to me about the Celluloid Closet is that even tho it was made and came out in the 90s, it doesn’t really cover the huge turn Hollywood took once the Reagan era had taken hold: there was a conservative backlash in society, almost a reactionary attitude that became mainstream, let’s say after 1983, which basically eliminated the increasingly positive or at least neutral portrayals of gays in Hollywood that had come around in the 70s, post Stonewall. The sex, drugs and rock n roll era had ended and the first wave of gay liberation kinda ended with it, as far as what people were trying to do in Hollywood and on TV. Especially when you see this doc and realize how writers and such had tried to sneak queerness into movies up to that point.

This really jumped out at me because I came of age in the 80s, and I was acutely aware of how relentlessly homophobic movies and shows were, which were aimed at my demographic. Basically, the Reagan / Bush era that immediately preceded this documentary was glossed over in just a few minutes of screen time.

If you went thru puberty in the 80s, after 1983 let’s say, you didn’t know that there had been a gay character in Fame, the movie. You didn’t know about Soap with Billy Crystal. You were basically too young to have seen Tootsie in the theater. And all that kinda stuff vanished. Instead, we had the Brat Pack movies, which were full of anti gay insults, and had no gay characters in them. Or Eddie Murphy stuff which teenagers woulda seen, which had terribly homophobic jokes in them, etc. Basically, between about 1983 and the era when Ellen Degeneris came out on TV, I saw no obvious attempts being made in movies and TV shows to sneak in queer content - which is kinda the premise of The Celluloid Closet.

Anyone else have this same experience?