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EPISODE 0: PROBLEMATIC HOLLYWOOD

LISTEN:  SOUNDCLOUD

SOURCES: listed at end of transcript

NOTES: We’re waiting on validation from the iTunes store and Stitcher is down, but everything will be available on other platforms soon!

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I’m Jack, and this is the first episode of “Tuck In: We’re Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories”. Kind of. It’s more of an Episode Zero. I wanted to have a little bit of a conversation, if you will, about why I decided to make this podcast and and, you know, some other important tidbits and facts.

So, I decided to make this podcast a couple of weeks ago after I had finished reading a book called The Whole Equation by an author named David Thomson. It’s a really good book, but it kinda became apparent about halfway through reading reading it that the author kind of has a low opinion of stars that had been been rumored to be gay or lesbians, and even really just women in general. 

So I was reading this book and, you know, I feel like he -- he crossed a line with me, at least, when he went on to say something about Monty Clift, and sort of disparaging Montgomery Clift. And, so, I -- I had a few drinks and I logged onto my tumblr -- my personal tumblr -- and I went on a rant. I went on a rant, and it started with my talking about Cary Grant. And I had been listening to You Must Remember This, a podcast by Karina Longworth which is an absolutely amazing podcast and I definitely suggest you should read it -- listen to it, I mean. So it’s kind of a widely agreed upon fact from several biographers that Cary Grant was gay. And I had never known that. You know, I’ve loved Cary Grant for a really solid portion of my life, um, you know, I wanted to be Cary Grant when I saw Arsenic and Old Lace, only slightly less than I wanted to be Marlon Brando when I saw Streetcar Named Desire. So I started off by talking about how angry I was that no one knew this. Or if they did, it wasn’t really widely known and I felt like it was sort of queer erasure in Hollywood. And you know, my rant went on and on and I talked about Marlon Brando and I talked a little bit  about Monty Clift and I invoked the great names of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn. Um -- but, you know, after all was said and done, uh, somebody kinda popular reblogged it and I got a reply from someone and they said, “Well, Cary Grant wasn’t gay. Cary Grant was bisexual.”

Okay, Cary Grant was bisexual. Or was he gay? Well, we -- we really don’t have any way of knowing. Because, and this is the important part here, a lot of queer history in Hollywood has been erased. And a lot of the people I’m gonna talk about, at least in the first half of the season, uh, we don’t know. They’re dead, and maybe, you know, things happened after they had died and someone came forward and said, “No, I had a relationship with this person” or there were rumors or it -- it -- you know, things like that. So there’s really no way of knowing, and the stories that I’m going to bringing to you are a lot of secondhand rumors and a lot of heresay. You know, you type in ‘gay Hollywood’ in Google, and at least three articles come up, you know, listicles come up that say, “Well, this peson was gay, and this person was gay, and this person was gay.“

So, you know, getting back to Marlon Brando, I just finished a biography of him called Brando’s Smile*, uh, I can’t remember the name of the author right now, uh, and it, uh, you know -- it’s mostly about her talking about his work and his good deeds and his life, um, a little about his personal life about his son’s murder trial and things like that. Um, and it, it mentions that he met James Dean. And James Dean just had stars in his eyes, and just, was so excited to meet him, and after he had passed away, Brando said it was such a shame. And, on one of these listicles that I, of course, clicked on, because I’m -- of course, I’m gonna click on clickbait, the very first entry was about Marlon Brando and James Dean having an affair. And again, there’s really no way of knowing, but in my journeys of researching this podcast, I did come across at least one time that Marlon Brando said, “Yeah, I’ve hooked up with a guy, it’s not a big deal. Everybody does it.”**

So, this gets to my second point, which is [that] a lot of Hollywood history has been erased simply by people who don’t want to admit it. People who are just really loyal fans and they’re like, “No, there’s no way that they were gay, there’s no way that they were a lesbian, you know, they were -- they were married, they had kids, they did all this stuff.” And you know, it’s true, Marlon Brando had six kids, at least six kids biologically, and he adopted another six and you know, he -- he was -- he had a lot of lovers, as it were. Um, but he did admit, that one time. “I totally made it with a dude”. So what I’m trying to say here is that’s really no indicator of sexuality. People even today, gay people, get married to people of the opposite sex and they have kids and, you know, they do all these things. So I wanna address that, and then, kind of, push it to the side.

A lot of the other reasons that gay Hollywood history has been erased -- it comes down to, you know, Hollywood fixers. If someone is caught hooking up with someone of the same sex, you know, the old studios hired people to to come in and grease some palms and make it all go away, and that did happen quite a bit. And sometimes it backfired like with Billy Haines, when he was outed by the police and the newspapers and then subsequently booted out of Hollywood. And we’ll talk a little bit about him later in the season. And, you know, it also happened because maybe some people were out openly in Hollywood but not necessarily public about their relationships. So, what it comes down to is, this information is lost, which kind of gets back to my second point.

Hollywood has -- Hollywood has a really history of sort of nurturing this weird, queer, artistic vibe, but then denying these same queer people their right to exist in history. So this season, we’re gonna kind of go ahead and start digging through all of the wreckage of queer Hollywood history. Uh -- I’m gonna start back in the silent era, with a little bit about Rudolph Valentino, who wasn’t gay, but we’ll get to that, and I’m gonna go all the way through the 60′s, with the Civil Rights movement, and with people starting to market towards a gay audience, and we’re gonna come all the way up to present day with  a little episode about American Gods and its awesome sex scene and great diversity. We’re gonna do some collaborative episodes, some roundtable episodes, with my roommates and creative collaborators who are also working on their own podcast and hopefully that’ll be out soon. Um, it’s gonna be a really great season and I hope you’re here for the entire ride.

Uh, but before I leave you, uh, I wanted to mention a little bit of uh, kind of a disclaimer about gendered language. I’m gonna try and use non-gendered language as much as possible, but uh, obviously it’s a pretty well-agreed upon fact that uh, unless I’m talking about a transgender person, that most of the old Hollywood stars were cisgender. Um, I’m also going to be referring to the LGBT community as ‘queer people’ as a collective. I think it’s just a little bit easier to say than ‘LGBT community’ every ten seconds. Uh, and I’m also going to probably be referring to groups of actors and actresses as ‘actors’, not to disparage actresses and all the shit they that they had to put up with, but it’s just once again a little bit easier in a spoken word format.

So, thank you for listening to the very first episode Tuck In, We’re Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This episode was recorded and edited by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a trasncript of this episode, along with our sources and some other fun facts and photos on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. Our ask box is open on tumblr for comments and suggestions, and you can also message us on Fcaebook. And uh, special thanks today for -- to my roommates Vanessa and Anissa for dealing with talking about this podcast for forever and forcing them to sit through a ton of old black and white movies that they’re not really sure if they like. Also special thanks to my friends Nicole and CJ all the way out in L.A. for giving me the name of the -- this series. Um, special thanks to my friends for listening to me, uh, talk about all this stuff. Shoutout to Kale for calling Lauren Bacall’s eyebrows ahead of their time. So thank you for listening! We’ll see you next time.

*Brando’s Smile, written by Susan L. Mizruchi (2014) **Full quote: “Homosexuality is so much in fashion that it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed.” (Celebrities in Hell, written by Warren Allen Smith)