I have not done any research on this so sorry if the answer is obvious but watching old films sometimes makes me wonder if the irl society and culture was like that but changed or if some movies were just extremely gay for no real life reason
my sense as somebody who watches and reads way too much old stuff is that a lot of stuff that reads to us as gay was not considered so at the time—like Wings, which was a hit at the time and (that I know of) caught no homophobic backlash, reads to modern eyes as being an extremely queer, and open about it, movie. Standards of intimacy, affection, relationships, etc. have shifted over time—you can see people in old books and movies interacting with their same-sex friends with huge amounts of physical and verbal affection, in ways that today read as romantic, and to my knowledge that was so normalized as a friend thing no one considered a queer reading into it. It’s a tragic slip of history that as queerness came more into the open, the heterosexual fear of being perceived as gay resulted in a lot of the “no homo” type behaviors and the expectations for what platonic relationships could look like shifted to the more distant version we have today.
WITH THAT SAID. There are gay characters in old movies who are clearly coded as gay! The “pansy craze” in the 30s, spotlighting gay drag culture from Greenwich Village, shows up bright as day in a Clara Bow picture. Here’s a clearly gay tailor measuring Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy. In Wings itself, there is a sequence showing various stages of a romantic relationship—and it includes a lesbian couple. The Hays Code in the 30s, and more broadly the great sweep of conservatism that hit the US in the 50s, killed a bunch of clear queer representation, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t showing up wherever it could, however it could.
Much like today, queer representation in media was spotty and faltering and sometimes demeaning, and didn’t keep up with the real life vibrancy of a lot of queer lives. but queer people have always been here, and it’s such a delight whenever we get to catch just a scrap of that authenticity in an old movie.
