Knight at the Movies Archives
ALL HAIL TCM: In honor of Gay Pride Turner Classic Movies devotes a solid month to the history of Our People at the Movies
We’re well into Pride month and Turner Classic Movies has been celebrating the history of Our People in the movies with an excellent
series of rarely seen queer tinged films stretching from the silent era to the early 1970s – over 65 years of cinematic history packed
into the 44 entries.  The series is titled
Screened Out: Gay Images in Film and TCM is not only devoting Monday and
Wednesday nights to programming it they’re giving it the special feature treatment by adding specially created documentary
vignettes with comments from current gay entertainers and filmmakers like
Alan Cumming, Charles Busch, Armistead Maupin,
Michael Musto, and Richard Barrios, whose book provided the inspiration for the series.  Barrios and TCM’s affable regular host
Robert Osborne also offer trivia packed introductions for 30 of the films.

But wait, there’s more:  in addition to the screenings, the new documentary featurettes and a detailed breakdown on each of the
films at the TCM website –
www.tcm.com – Turner Classics has also partnered with AOL and created an additional mini site specifically
devoted to Screened Out that includes instant access to the newly created featurettes, movie trailers and more –
gayandlesbian.aol.
com/screenedout

Each night of Screened Out is themed – “The Early Years,” “Before the Code,” and “Men and Women Behind Bars” which offered rare
silents, movies with overt queer characters before the Moral Code was ushered in in 1934, and gays behind bars were featured the
first three nights.  Here’s the rest of the schedule and themes with screening times adjusted for Chicago:

Wednesday, June 13 – “The Dark Side: Film Noir and Crime”
7:00 PM  The Big Combo (’55)
9:00 PM  Suddenly, Last Summer (’59)
11:00 PM  Reflections in a Golden Eye (’67)
1:00 AM  Gilda (’46)
3:00 AM  The Maltese Falcon (’41)

Monday, June 18 – “Horror”
7:00 PM  The Uninvited (’44)
9:00 PM  The Picture of Dorian Gray (’45)
11:00 PM  Voodoo Island (’57)
12:30 AM  The Haunting (’63)
2:30 AM  The Seventh Victim (’43)

Wednesday, June 20 – “Comedy”
7:00 PM  Manhattan Parade (’31)
8:30 PM  Sylvia Scarlett (’36)
10:15 PM  Turnabout (’40)
11:45 PM  That Touch of Mink (’62)
1:30 AM  The Producers (’68)
3:15 AM  Designing Woman (’57)

Monday, June 25 – “Code-Busters”
7:00 PM  Tea and Sympathy (’56)
9:15 PM  Advise and Consent (’62)
11:45 PM  The Children’s Hour (’61)
1:45 AM  Walk on the Wild Side (’62)
3:45 AM  Victim (’61)

Wednesday, June 27 – “Out and Open”
7:00 PM  Staircase (’69)
9:00 PM  The Fox (’67)
11:00 PM  The Boys in the Band (’70)
1:15 AM  The Killing of Sister George (’68)

It’s hard for me to single out any one title as these are all virtually worth adding to your DVR or Tivo recording schedule and
additionally many of these films aren’t available on DVD so get ‘em while their hot.  That goes for some of the better known titles
here as well – like the equally adored and reviled Boys in the Band and two of my favorite queer tinged classics,
The Picture of Dorian
Gray
and The Uninvited.  The series also offers a very rare showing of Staircase in which Professor Henry Higgins and King Arthur a/k/a
Rex Harrison and Richard Burton play gay lovers.  The film’s a dud but a fascinating one – an example of how trendy and “shocking”
the gay “lifestyle” had become by the late 60s.

For the uninitiated, used to overt queer cinema offerings like
Another Gay Movie, Eating Out and the like and explicit cable TV shows
like Queer as Folk, The L Word, Dante’s Cove, and Noah’s Arc, many of the films in the TCM line-up will be so outdated as to be
laughable, frustrating, and sad, which queer actor and activist Alan Cumming notes in one of his interviews for the series.  But
Screened Out offers the fleshed out, detailed history of gays and lesbians at the movies which the excellent documentary The Celluloid
Closet could only encapsulate.  And embracing and understanding our history and place in movies – still this country’s greatest
cultural equalizer – is essential, I think, for our creative growth and place within that culture.  Noting the huge leaps we’ve made
onscreen in just the last ten years is an additional bonus that the series brings to mind.

TCM is to be commended for devoting such obvious care and dedication in presenting
Screened Out (naturally there have been
protests and the usual online threats about boycotting the cable station, bla, bla, bla).  Here’s hoping a regular series of queer
movie favorites follows in its wake.  Guess who's ready to volunteer to program it for them?
Know Thy History, Know Thyself:
Screened Out: Gay Images in Film
6-13-07 Windy City Times Knight at the Movies Column
By Richard Knight, Jr.