Queer Sexualities in Early Film
Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy
by Shane Brown
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Book Presentation:
Since the publication of Vito Russo's seminal study The Celluloid Closet in 1981, much has been written about the representation of queer characters on screen. Until now, however, relatively little attention has been paid to how queer sexualities were portrayed in films from the silent and early sound period. By looking in detail at a succession of recently-found films and revisiting others, Shane Brown examines images of male-male intimacy, buddy relationships and romantic friendships in European and American films made prior to 1934, including Different from the Others and All Quiet on the Western Front. He places these films within their socio-political and scientific context and sheds new light on how they were intended to be viewed and how they were actually perceived. In doing so, Brown offers his readers a unique insight into a little known area of early cinema, queer studies and social history.
About the Author:
Claire Nally is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English Literature, Linguistics and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author of Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-editor or Bloomsbury Library of Gender and Popular Culture and Deputy Editor (including reviews) of the open access journal C21 Literature.Angela Smith is Professor of Language and Culture at the University of Sunderland, UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on media discourses, gender, the portrayal of immigrants and the representation of politicians.
Press Reviews:
‘Shane Brown offers a critical and much needed addition to the fields of film history and queer studies. He brings to light a range of films and reads them through their historical moment. In the process he gives definition and depth of understanding to the way that homosexuality and the homosocial have been perceived historically both in the European and American cinemas of the early twentieth century.’ (Michael Hammond, Associate Professor of Film History, University of Southampton)
‘Shane Brown’s Queer Sexualities in Early Film : Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy is a fine addition to an expanding canon of volumes which explore the covert history of queer cinema. Brown is effectively a detective … opening up commentary on the roots of non-traditional masculinity in film well beyond queer cinema.’ (Lindsay Coleman, film and television academic at the University of Melbourne and Editor of Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema (I.B.Tauris, 2015).)
See the publisher website: I.B.Tauris
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