Gay silent movie actors

Haines was born on the eve of the first day of , and his biographer William J. Mann stresses that he was the ultimate child of the 20 th century. From to , thanks to hits like Brown of Harvard and Tell It to the Marines , Billy Haines was ranked as one of the Top 10 box office stars in Hollywood.

Haines was discovered by a talent scout and signed with Goldwyn Pictures in [a] His career gained momentum when he received favorable reviews for his role in The Midnight Express. Listen to the complete Episode 5 below, and subscribe to You Must Remember This on iTunes. In fact, William Haines was actually better set up for the transition than many stars.

Here’s how they got the iconic shot that changed everything. You Must Remember This , the podcast that tells the secret and forgotten history of 20 th -century Hollywood, has joined Panoply. Sometimes Billy would get asked a softball question about his love life, which he was always able to deflect with a wisecrack.

A specifically gay film history begins at the deepest roots of motion pictures, at the Thomas Edison Black Maria studio in William Dickson's under-two-minute experimental sound film was only known as a silent film until its sound cylinder was modernly rediscovered, & the film fully restored in Initially, the studio hired Cukor to direct the classic movie, Gone With The Wind.

At the peak of his stardom in the late s, Billy Haines reportedly managed to get the morals clause removed from his contract entirely, by refusing to sign until it was. The legend holds that Haines was a major box office draw who was fired by Louis B. Mayer for refusing to drop his live-in boyfriend and marry a woman.

As a trade-off, MGM would only sign him to two-year extensions at a time, rather than the five-year contracts that were more standard. And when each episode airs, creator and host Karina Longworth will share some of the research that went into the episode in a transcript excerpt here on Slate.

Charles William "Billy" Haines (January 2, – December 26, ) was an American actor and interior designer. In , every studio in Hollywood agreed to follow the moral guidelines laid out by the Hays Production Code, but it was an empty promise: Everyone knew the Hays Office had no ability to punish violators of the code.

You might know some, but we. Haines made the transition to talkies seamlessly, and would be the peak of his box office stardom. Haines was told going in that he was to abandon his usual winking, wisecracking persona for this film, but it seems like he ignored that edict.

If anything, while producers were waiting for the censors to come up with a way to enforce their puritan code, movies got racier. In , on a trip to New York while on the cusp of his superstardom, Haines had a whirlwind fling with a year-old former sailor names Jimmy Shields.

By the time Thalberg made that speech, he and everyone else in the Hollywood community knew that Haines was, for all intents and purposes, married to a man. Journalist and subject would wink at each other, the actor would be classified in print as an eligible or confirmed bachelor, and everyone would move on.

When Haines returned to L. And the local movie press knew, too, but nobody had any incentive to publish an exposé about it or anything. He was cast in the film Brown of Harvard and his performance solidified his screen. If nothing else, Haines was always looking for an opening for a bawdy wisecrack or double-entendre.

He had tutored Olivia de Havilland and Vivien Leigh in their roles for months before being asked to leave as lead actor Clark Gable had a problem working with Cukor because he was gay. Gays of Yore This silent film made gay history. If any journalist had, he would have been frozen out of MGM for the rest of time.

His voice was robust and not thickly accented. The trouble was still to come. So, here are some Old Hollywood stars you probably didn’t know were LGBTQ. During the s, Haines always found ways to answer questions about his personal life without either lying or telling the truth. The Golden Age of Hollywood gave us many of the biggest icons of the 20th Century.

In fact, he was, and Haines was easily able to perform the same trick accomplished by the intertitles as a talking comedian. Read about the LGBT members of Hollywood that shaped the industry, even if their personal lives weren't always out in the open. But did you know the film industry's queer culture existed even before that famous HOLLYWOODLAND sign went up in , and half of Tinseltown kept their identities a secret to safeguard their careers?

When an earnest journalist from out of town asked him when are you going to get married, Haines would announce he was engaged to an imminently ineligible lady—usually frumpy slapstick comedienne Polly Moran. One of the earliest speculated lavender marriages was the union of silent film actor and early sex symbol Rudolph Valentino and actress Jean Acker, who was rumored to have been lesbian.