Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies - Parker Tyler

The first major book about homosexuality in film. Parker Tyler makes the book interesting on a surface level by reaching into the history of movies to find examples of homosexuality in both large and small movies. He proves the veil that made old Hollywood so clean wasn't fully covered. More importantly though, Tyler takes issue with the nature of sexuality in film. One of his biggest points is that sexuality doesn't end with sexual preference, but instead begins there which means both hetero and homosexuality comes in all kinds of forms. It opens up the discussion to include all kinds of sexual natures and identities. Tyler is so thorough that he de-masks the title of his book so it doesn't represent just homsexuality, but the entire cosmos of sexual identity. The point Tyler tries to make, I think, is that since a lot of fuss is made over homosexuality, looking at sexuality as a fight between that and heterosexuality is making it a black and white issue. This had to be tough subject matter in the late 1960s. Screening the Sexes begins as an inspection of the back end of Hollywood history and concludes as a theoretical study into the nature of sexuality. It's everything we hope to get with a Parker Tyler book.