In the 1930s, the infamous Hays Code came to Hollywood, a conservative set of motion picture guidelines that outlawed American films from featuring anything deemed lewd, crude, explicit, or—of course—gay.
Unfortunately, this time of strict moral conservatism all but snuffed out what’s become known as the “pansy craze,” an era of increased LGBTQ+ representation in popular culture with a spotlight on drag artists and other overtly queer acts.
But even under the Hays Cods, the industry managed to find plenty of loopholes to keep the flames of the craze alive on film, using coded language and other signifiers to depict or reference gay characters without directly naming them as such.
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You know, “confirmed bachelors.” Fellas who were “a bit funny,” or maybe “light in their loafers.’
To celebrate Pride Month, the cinema historians over at TCM have programmed an entire night of films from the ’30s that gleefully danced around the rules to bring a winking version queer representation to the screen at a time when it was illegal, with features like 1932’s Call Her Midnight (which has a whole musical number clearly set at a gay bar) to dynamic duo Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers’ The Gay Divorcee from 1934.
It’s that latter film, The Gay Divorcee, that brings up a fascinating point: If the Hays Code forbade Hollywood from including the gays in their movies, how could they get away with a title like that?
Well, of course, “gay” has long had more than one meaning. In fact, it’d still be quite some time until the word would be widely recognized in the mainstream to mean anything other than “cheerful, lighthearted, and carefree.” But even in the ’30s, if you knew… you knew.
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Speaking with IndieWire, Alonso Duralde—author of TCM’s Hollywood Pride book—sheds some light on the history of “gay” coming to represent homosexuality:
“I quoted William Mann in his film Behind The Screen, who said back in 2001 that the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘homosexual’ had been floating around for at least the better part of a century at that point. And he, in turn, quotes Gary Schmidgall, who was a biographer of Walt Whitman, who said that there were cases of people using it that way in the first years of the 20th century.”
In that sense, the term “gay” as we know has been around for a least 100 years. And, according to Duralde, by the time the ’30s rolled around, it would have been “very intramural.” That is to say, those within our community were already using it, and those who weren’t were none the wiser.
And that brings us to a very fascinating point in the history of gay—as in homosexual—being used on screen. Sure, a title like The Gay Divorcee could be secretly winking to LGBTQ+ theater-goers, but the original “happy” definition of the term still applies.
So when was “gay” actually used in film to specifically denote or identify queerness?
Why Bringing Up Baby is part of LGBTQ+ film history
Though there is some debate, many scholars point to 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, the classic, fast-talking screwball comedy from Howard Hawks starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and… a leopard.
In the film, Grant plays paleontologist David Huxley who is looking for funding for his museum exhibit when he gets tangled up with Hepburn’s Susan Vance, an eccentric heiress who wants him all to herself. Through a wacky turn of events which finds David at Susan’s estate looking after her pet leopard Baby, she eventually hides his clothes in an effort to keep him from leaving.
With nothing to wear, he grabs Susan’s frilly robe, and that’s when there’s a buzz at the door—it’s Susan’s wealthy aunt Elizabeth Random (May Robson). Confused by his appearance, she asks a flustered David why he’s wearing the robe, to which he jokingly replies, “Because I went GAY all of a sudden!”
Now, you could interpret that line a few different ways, but in retrospect it feels like a strikingly modern use of the term (albeit slightly outdated in that it posits an otherwise straight man wouldn’t normally be caught wearing something so feminine).
Still, the censors—with their eyes on the Hays Code—didn’t catch it, nor would we expect them to; “gay” as in “homosexual” was just coded slang only heard among the community. Which begs the question: what queer snuck that line in their to begin with?
“My understanding is that by the time Bringing Up Baby came out, the word ‘gay’ was known in some circles to mean homosexual,” TCM’s Dave Karger says to IndieWire in the same piece. “And the story goes that Cary Grant ad-libbed that line. So, I would like to think that he that Cary Grant knew what he was saying when he allegedly came up with that line.”
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Wait, if Hollywood heartthrob Cary Grant was hip to the cool queer slang of the time, that’d have to mean he was one of us, right? This wouldn’t be the first time those rumors were stirred up—after all, all of Hollywood knew he was living with his “friend” and fellow actor Randolph Scott for a number of years.
Whether or not Grant intentionally used the word as a subtle signal to his fellow gays, that specific utterance of “gay” means Bringing Up Baby holds a special place in the early canon of LGBTQ+ cinema, right alongside the pansies and other Code-thwarting queers who dared to push the limits.
Bringing Up Baby is currently available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, and YouTubeTV. A full broadcast schedule for TCM’s Pride programming can found here, and titles are also available to subscribers of the WatchTCM app.
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