Books like The Lavender Screen by Boze Hadleigh

A landmark examination of how homosexuality has been portrayed in motion pictures, exploring the evolution of gay and lesbian representation, the forces of censorship, and the cultural impact of these films over time.

Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was “invented” as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white “color line,” the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality. At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public’s attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual “deviance” were used to reinforce each other’s terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis’s late nineteenth-century work on “sexual inversion,” the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer’s fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Queering the Color Line will have broad appeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.

This work documents the influence of gays and lesbians in the film world. Some people know about the artier side of gay cinema or that Rock Hudson was gay, but few people know that gay men directed movies like "Dirty Dancing", "The China Syndrome", or "Marathon Man". This book includes chapters such as Queer, Lesbian, Gay Male, Transgender, Camp, and Honourable and Dishonourable Mentions. It is fully indexed and cross-referenced.

Parker Tyler (1904-1974) was a noted American film critic, and this text is regarded as his most significant work. Devoted to homosexuality in films, it aims to look beyond the obvious and to observe the psychology of sex roles, at the same time recognising film as the realm of contemporary mythology. Tyler was once described as one of the most consistently interesting and provocative writers on film that America has produced, well-informed and free of cant.

Screened Out traces how Hollywood’s films from the early 1900s to today have depicted gay characters, revealing the mix of stereotypes, tragedy, and moments of compassion that shaped public perception of homosexuality in cinema.

From the stereotypes and subversive sub-texts of earlier works to the complex visibility of queer identity in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the contributors to this collection discuss the varying contexts and deployments of homosexuality to define and deconstruct the cultural values of British popular cinema.

B. Ruby Rich designated a brand new genre, the New Queer Cinema (NQC), in her groundbreaking article in the 'Village Voice' in 1992. This movement in film and video was intensely political and aesthetically innovative, made possible by the debut of the camcorder, and driven initially by outrage over the unchecked spread of AIDS. The genre has grown to include an entire generation of queer artists, filmmakers, and activists. As a critic, curator, journalist, and scholar, Rich has been inextricably linked to the New Queer Cinema from its inception. This volume presents her new thoughts on the topic, as well as bringing together the best of her writing on the NQC.