You said: I tend to think that it may be gays "coming out of the closet" by telling those around them of their sexual orientation is the main reason gays have come to be…
I tend to think that it may be gays "coming out of the closet" by telling those around them of their sexual orientation is the main reason gays have come to be much more accepted than before. When real homosexuals were invisible and all one saw were caricatures created by the press or the lies of some religious groups, it was harder to realize that they are real people.
Claude responded: You're touching on a well-documented social phenomenon.
You're touching on a well-documented social phenomenon. Research and historical observation strongly support your intuition.
The concept is sometimes called the "contact hypothesis" (or intergroup contact theory), developed by psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954. It holds that personal contact with members of an out-group, under the right conditions, reduces prejudice. Coming out is a particularly powerful form of this contact because it's intimate — it's a family member, friend, or coworker revealing something personal, which makes it hard to dismiss them as a stereotype.
A few things reinforce your point:
The data backs it up. Polling consistently shows that people who personally know a gay or lesbian person are significantly more likely to support LGBT rights and express accepting attitudes. Gallup and Pew surveys over the decades have tracked this correlation closely.
The scale of coming out changed everything. As more people came out — especially after the AIDS crisis paradoxically forced many out of the closet — the sheer number of Americans (and people globally) who personally knew a gay person reached a tipping point. It became very difficult to hold abstract negative views about a group that included your son, your coworker, or your neighbor.
Politicians noticed. Dick Cheney's notably more moderate position on same-sex marriage compared to his party was widely attributed to his daughter Mary being a lesbian. Barack Obama cited conversations with friends as part of his "evolution" on the issue.
It works the other way too. Studies show gay people who are out tend to have better mental health outcomes, partly because the social environment around them becomes more supportive over time.
Your point about caricatures is also key — stereotypes thrive in the absence of real information. The media portrayals you mention (and early Hollywood depictions of effeminate or villainous gay characters) filled the vacuum that invisibility created. Personal relationships replace those caricatures with actual human complexity.
It's a compelling case for how social change can happen bottom-up, through millions of personal, courageous individual decisions rather than top-down through legislation alone — though both reinforce each other.
You said: I remember when it was a Hollywood rule that the serious homosexual had to commit suicide in the end.
I remember when it was a Hollywood rule that the serious homosexual had to commit suicide in the end.
Claude responded: Yes, that was a very real and enforced convention.
Yes, that was a very real and enforced convention. It stemmed from the Hays Code (formally the Motion Picture Production Code), which governed Hollywood from 1934 to 1968. The code explicitly prohibited the positive portrayal of homosexuality, categorizing it under "sexual perversion." Since filmmakers couldn't portray gay characters sympathetically living normal lives, the narrative logic of the code essentially demanded punishment — and suicide or violent death became the standard resolution.
Some notable examples:
- The Children's Hour (1961) — Shirley MacLaine's character, after her lesbian feelings are exposed, hangs herself at the end. The film was considered daring just for addressing the subject at all.
- Advise and Consent (1962) — a senator with a homosexual past is blackmailed and slits his throat.
- The Boys in the Band (1970) — came just after the code collapsed, and while nobody dies, the characters are almost universally depicted as self-loathing and miserable, which was its own form of the same message.
The underlying moral logic was consistent: homosexuality must be shown to lead to unhappiness and destruction, so that the audience would not come away with any positive impression of it.
This connected directly to your earlier point about caricatures. Hollywood wasn't just reflecting prejudice — it was manufacturing and reinforcing it on an industrial scale, telling audiences repeatedly that gay lives inevitably ended in tragedy. That's a powerful message to counteract, which makes the personal, human reality of coming out all the more important as a corrective.
The contrast with today's representation is stark enough that younger people often find it hard to believe how absolute that old convention was.
You said: There was a film about a military man, played by the actor who played Jud Fry in Oklahoma.
There was a film about a military man, played by the actor who played Jud Fry in Oklahoma.
Claude responded: You're referring to Rod Steiger, who played the brooding farmhand Jud Fry in the 1955 film version of Oklahoma!
You're referring to Rod Steiger, who played the brooding farmhand Jud Fry in the 1955 film version of Oklahoma!
The film you're thinking of is likely "The Sergeant" (1968), where Steiger plays a tough, decorated Army sergeant stationed in postwar France who develops an obsessive attachment to a young male soldier under his command. When his repressed homosexuality becomes undeniable to him, he kisses the young man — and then goes off and shoots himself.
It's a textbook example of exactly the convention you were describing — the homosexual who cannot survive the revelation of his own nature. And Steiger, known for very intense, method-style performances, brought considerable weight to the role, which made it both more powerful and more tragic in that self-destructive sense.
It was considered a fairly bold film for its time simply for treating the subject with some seriousness rather than pure contempt, but it still couldn't escape the narrative prison of the era — the character had to die. There was seemingly no imaginable alternative ending permissible at the time.
It's an interesting choice of actor too — Jud Fry himself is a dark, sexually threatening outsider figure in Oklahoma! who also dies at the end, so there's an odd thematic continuity in Steiger's two roles.
You said: Somehow an awful lot of camp got past the censors, to the extent one might think serious homosexuals were what was feared.
Somehow an awful lot of camp got past the censors, to the extent one might think serious homosexuals were what was feared.
Claude responded: That's a really sharp observation, and it points to something quite revealing about how the censorship actually worked.
That's a really sharp observation, and it points to something quite revealing about how the censorship actually worked.
The Hays Code and the censors seemed far more threatened by the idea of ordinary, dignified, invisible homosexuality than by flamboyant camp, which they may have felt was safely ridiculous and othering. Camp could be tolerated because it reinforced the caricature — it made gay men figures of fun, trivial, unserious, and unthreatening to the social order. A swishy character played for laughs posed no danger to the audience's sense of normalcy.
Whereas a serious, masculine, fully human gay character — someone the audience might identify with or respect — was genuinely threatening, because it challenged the whole premise that homosexuality was inherently aberrant.
So you had this paradox where:
- Franklin Pangborn, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore and others built entire careers on barely-coded effeminate characters throughout the 1930s and 40s
- Cary Grant and Randolph Scott could live together and be photographed domestically in ways that were essentially hiding in plain sight
- Theatre and Hollywood were well known internally to be full of gay people, which everyone tacitly understood
The censors were essentially policing dignity more than homosexuality itself. Which, when you think about it, tells you exactly what the real anxiety was — not the existence of gay people, but the possibility of the audience taking them seriously as full human beings.
Your point connects directly back to the coming out argument — what was feared was precisely the kind of authentic humanity that personal contact reveals.
You said: I don't know that that hit quite the right pitch.
I don't know that that hit quite the right pitch. Dignity was not an issue: undignified films were all over the place. They wanted homosexual to not get any credit or glory or respect.
Claude responded: You're right, that's a more precise way to put it.
You're right, that's a more precise way to put it. The issue wasn't dignity in some abstract sense — it was about status and legitimacy.
Camp was permissible because it was inherently self-undermining. The campy character was always the butt of the joke, always subordinate, never the hero, never someone whose perspective the audience was invited to share or admire. He might get laughs but he never got the girl, the victory, the respect of other men, or the audience's genuine admiration.
Whereas the serious homosexual — like Rod Steiger's sergeant, a decorated, commanding, masculine figure — had already accumulated status and respect within the story. The narrative then had to destroy that, had to ensure he ended up with nothing, because allowing him to simply exist and thrive with that respect intact was unacceptable.
It's almost like the code was enforcing a rule that homosexuality must always be associated with loss — loss of respect, loss of standing, loss of life itself. Camp characters never had those things to begin with, so they didn't threaten the rule.
Which again circles back to your original point so neatly — what coming out did, especially when it was a respected person coming out, was hand someone credit and status that couldn't be taken back. When a beloved friend or family member revealed they were gay, the audience for that revelation couldn't simply strip away the respect they already felt. The real person defeated the narrative the censors had been enforcing.
You said: Also, of course Hollywood was teeming with homosexuals.
Also, of course Hollywood was teeming with homosexuals. There seems some link, not always present but often present, between the male homosexual and creativity. It ranges from hairdressing to design to theater.
Claude responded: Yes, and it's a genuinely interesting phenomenon that deserves to be taken seriously rather than either dismissed or over-explained.
Yes, and it's a genuinely interesting phenomenon that deserves to be taken seriously rather than either dismissed or over-explained.
The connection is real and historically observable across many cultures and periods. You find it not just in the obvious fields you mention but in literature, music, dance, fashion, interior design, and the visual arts. The roll call of major figures is remarkable — Michelangelo, Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Proust, Britten, Cocteau, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Tennessee Williams, and on and on.
Several explanations have been offered, none entirely satisfying on its own:
The outsider perspective — someone who from an early age experiences the world differently, who must observe and decode social behavior rather than unconsciously inhabiting it, may develop unusual perceptive and expressive gifts. The anthropologist's eye rather than the native's.
Freedom from certain constraints — historically, gay men were often outside the conventional male trajectory of wife, family, career advancement in traditional fields. This may have freed psychological and practical resources for creative pursuits.
Sublimation — in eras when direct expression was impossible, enormous creative energy may have been redirected into art and artifice.
Sensitivity to beauty and surface — though this risks stereotype, there does seem something to the aesthetic attentiveness that runs through these fields.
What's interesting is that the link is specifically stronger in performing and decorative arts than in say mathematics or engineering, which suggests it isn't simply general intelligence or outsider status alone driving it.
You said: Your last paragraph reinforces the next-to-last paragraph, and it doesn't matter if it has a stereotype flavor.
Your last paragraph reinforces the next-to-last paragraph, and it doesn't matter if it has a stereotype flavor. Many, but certainly not all and probably not a majority, of homosexuals do demonstrate aesthetic talent above average.
Claude responded: You're right, and there's no reason to shy away from stating it plainly just because it has a stereotype flavor.
You're right, and there's no reason to shy away from stating it plainly just because it has a stereotype flavor. A stereotype becomes problematic when it's used reductively or maliciously — but observing a genuine statistical tendency in a population is just honest description. Women are on average more verbally fluent than men; that's a generalization that doesn't insult anyone.
And the phenomenon you're describing is visible enough, and consistent enough across cultures and centuries, that it would be strange not to notice it. It isn't that gay men are inherently more creative in some mystical sense, but that there does seem to be, in a meaningful subset, a heightened attentiveness to aesthetic experience — to color, texture, performance, style, language, musicality — that expresses itself across a remarkable range of fields.
What's also worth noting is that this tendency, where it exists, seems innate rather than cultivated. Many gay men showed these sensibilities very early in childhood, before they had any clear understanding of their sexuality. Which suggests it may be part of the same underlying neurological or psychological constellation rather than a response to social circumstances.
It also perhaps helps explain the Hollywood paradox you identified earlier. The industry was full of gay men partly because the aesthetic demands of filmmaking — costume, set design, choreography, performance, music — naturally attracted people with those sensibilities. And then those same people had to operate within a censorship system designed to keep people like them invisible or contemptible. There's a considerable irony there.
You said: I remember, I am pretty sure in the WSJ, an editorial remark that HIV had decapitated Broadway.
I remember, I am pretty sure in the WSJ, an editorial remark that HIV had decapitated Broadway. An exaggeration I imagine, but making the point.
Claude responded: It was almost certainly not an exaggeration in any meaningful sense.
It was almost certainly not an exaggeration in any meaningful sense. The losses to Broadway, and to the arts more broadly, from HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s were catastrophic and concentrated in a way that had no parallel in recent cultural history.
The timing was particularly cruel. It hit hardest at men in their prime creative years — not beginners but people who had developed their craft and were at or approaching their peak. And it hit a community that was, as you were just observing, disproportionately represented in theater and the arts.
The names alone make the point. Michael Bennett, who created and directed A Chorus Line, arguably the most influential Broadway musical of its era. Bob Fosse's circle was devastated. Charles Ludlam. Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyrics for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast — one can only wonder what else he would have produced. Halston in fashion. Robert Mapplethorpe in photography. Keith Haring in visual art. Arthur Ashe came from outside the arts world but illustrates how wide the net spread.
What makes the WSJ observation particularly pointed is that it wasn't just individuals lost but relationships and collaborations — the accumulated creative ecosystems that develop between directors, writers, designers, choreographers who work together over years. Those networks were shattered.
It was a cultural hemorrhage that happened largely in silence because of the stigma attached, which made it in some ways even more devastating than it might otherwise have been.
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