Why do you think they called them "best boys"?

But what Hollywood became, at least for a time, Mann says, was a kingdom -- or queendom -- where passing wasn't necessary. It was made up of duchies (certain studio departments) in which homosexuality was the norm. Talent was the currency, and if you had it, you could buy the tolerance of even the town's most rabid homophobes, like MGM chief Louis B. Mayer.

By the 1920s, homosexuals -- especially in departments such as makeup, set decoration and wardrobe -- were not only acknowledged, they were welcomed by the studio heads. In 1925, MGM hired Russian designer Erté, and his partner, Nicholas Ouroussoff, picking up the expenses for both; Mayer, "whose antipathy to homosexuals was well known," even invited them to his home for dinner. Erté insisted that his relationship with Mayer was always a pleasant one, and Mayer, according to Mann, seemed authentically regretful when Erté left MGM. "For gays in the studio wardrobe departments, there existed an extraordinary environment of freedom and tolerance, found virtually nowhere else in American industry." It wasn't merely tolerated, Mann says: "Being gay actually carried with it some cachet."

Yet as early as 1923, journalist Herbert Howe, who was gay himself and romantically involved at the time with Mexican film idol Ramon Novarro, sounded a cheeky, albeit prophetic, warning in a Photoplay article when he commented on the effeminacy of the movie heroes of the time:

From the moment Valentino hoofed that tango in "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" and set the flappers cuckooing, the movie boys haven't been the same. They're all racing around wearing spit curls, bobbed hair and silk panties ... There seems to be no end to gallantry these days -- gallantry, hair and ruffles. Ramon Novarro, who wore less than Gunga Din but with more chic in "Where the Pavement Ends," is Scaramouching around Hollywood dressed up like Caesar's pet horse. This can't keep up. The public can stand just so many ruffles and no more. Some of the boys had better walk up one flight and get some blue serge nifties. It's a cinch if they don't change their panties some of the producers are going to lose theirs.

Sure enough, by 1926 Hollywood began to bite back. Shortly before Valentino's death that year, the Chicago Tribune was calling the unprecedentedly popular heartthrob a "pink powder puff," asking, "When will we be rid of these effeminate youths, pomaded, powdered, bejeweled and bedizened in the image of Rudy -- that painted pansy?" A few years later, a Fox executive would write to his boss, "I think the quicker we get away from degenerates and fairies in our stories, the better off we are going to be. I do not want any of them in Fox pictures." And Variety described Production Code czar Will Hays' tenets of movie morality as a campaign to "keep the dual-sex boys and lesbos out of films."

By the 1950s, spurred by the motion picture strikes of 1945 (which had roots in a campaign for increased wages by the set decorators) and the House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunts, the industry had taken a harshly intolerant turn. "For many," Mann writes, "sexual perversion and political subversion became interchangeable. The Right linked homosexuality with sedition, equating it with moral weakness and conflating it with Communism ... The industry saw the decorators as both gay and Communists; ergo gays were Communists."

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