Screened Out: playing gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall by Richard Barrios

The pansy cowboy in Hollywood's closet

In 1981, Vito Russo wrote a book called The Celluloid Closet, which became the Rob Epstein documentary of the same name in 1995. It was a watershed moment in the popularisation of "gay studies". Here on screen, and spliced together for the first time, were those top-hatted lesbians of 1930s, the flouncing nellie boys making musicals in the 1940s, the 1950s closet cases saying lines so close to the bone that they seemed more like surgery than art.

It included an astonishing movie clip: an experimental film from Thomas Edison in the 1890s. This shows a host of men waltzing together like ghosts; no doubt its innocent homoeroticism was not intentional, and Barrios dismisses it in one sentence (despite the subtitle, he really starts 10 years after Edison and ends 10 years after Stonewall). More interesting, certainly, is the dusty camp of Algie the Miner from 1912, made by one Alice Guy-Blaché: "the first woman director in film history", according to Barrios.

Perhaps Alla Nazimova's Salomé from 1922 can be interpreted as the first film to be self-consciously homoerotic in intent, rather than an assortment of nancy-boy vaudeville clichés. Pretty soon, overtly gay films were coming thick and fast, and there was a bona fide "pansy craze" in which camp actors like Franklin Pangbourne found many cheery roles.

It got to the point where a movie was even promoted as gay. In 1930, The Dude Wrangler was tagged as "the story of a pansy cowboy – oh dear!" on its poster. That film has been lost and no print exists, and the lead actor was obliged to change his name.

The party soon ended. By 1934 the informal Hays code became policed by the gimlet-eyed Production Code Administrator, and vicious anti-Semite, Joseph Breen. Henceforth all references to "perversion" were rigorously excluded. Still, there was always "uranism" to be found in Vicente Minelli's "Fairy Unit", making musicals at MGM. And Howard Hawks provided plenty of sly innuendo in movies like Bringing Up Baby, with Cary Grant.

Otto Preminger too did much to challenge the code ("think of him as a bald male teutonic Madonna" simpers Barrios, irritatingly taking for granted a Madonna-endorsing audience). Then there were the Fifties: the Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies, the rush of Sapphic "women in jail" exploitation flicks, and the arrival of teen culture pushing to the inevitable relaxation of anti-gay censorship as early as 1962. By January 1969, Variety was able to trumpet "Homo'n'lesbo films at Peak!"

For all Barrios's occasional lapses into crass tribal assumptions, this is really a very good book, readable and pointed despite its dry presentation. As with all the best academic tomes, there are truffles in the footnotes.

One contains one of the book's few personal references, about a Tennessee Williams film shown on TV in the late Sixties. We learn "at least one mother told an adolescent son 'no child of mine is going to be watching something by Tennessee Williams'." Barrios, one feels, has been defying his mother to feast with Tennessee and his ilk ever since.