Earliest film I've seen that 'gay' was used

** Well, I wasn't writing about the way certain characters in those movies acted towards homosexuals, I meant the general way homosexuality was presented. **

The word "homosexuality" is vague when you are referring to what characters actually say or do at the instigation of screenwriters and directors. Say you are referring to "the general way homosexuality is presented" in the 21st century. To continue your approach in a "general way" would you lump The Kids Are Alright and Brokeback Mountain together with gay porn? Consider that any kind of porn movie was difficult for most Americans to find in the year 1968 when Boston Strangler came out. So what was the "general way homosexuality was presented" in the era before home video made porn available? Would you include the lyric in Gee Officer Krupke in which Riff (Russ Tamblyn) sings "My brother wears a dress" in 1961? When you go general about something that never existed (Gore Vidal said in the 1960s there are no homosexual people, there are just homosexual acts) you have to sweep together every small detail.

** In the universe of The Children's Hour, which was most likely true to life, **

How do you know? Did you attend a private girls' boarding school in Massachusetts in 1961 or prior ? (Lillian Hellman said it took place in Massachusetts.)

** MacLaine's character was forced to lead a repressed life and finally commit suicide because of how society looked upon being gay. **

Nobody is forced to commit suicide. You can argue that a screenwriter or playwright can force a fictional character to commit suicide. In what way does Martha (MacLaine's character) deserve a comparison with any allegedly closeted gay person who committed suicide, such as Hemingway? Hemingway was real. Martha wasn't.

** Now, you might take that character's tragedy as social criticism about the bad way gays were treated back then, but I think that wasn't quite the intention. The author of the orginal play personally stated that it wasn't about homosexuality, it was about what a child's lie can do. That would make the aforementioned tragdy just a plot device that shows lesbians as innerly twisted people that can only end in tragedy. **

Martha is the only possibly lesbian or bi-curious character out of dozens in the two - hour movie. How did the Children's Hour screenwriter or director William Wyler show lesbians in general as "innerly twisted?"

I have seen The Celluloid Closet. It is available to anyone for free viewing on You Tube in multiple parts. I disagree with some of its innuendo. How do we know the gay people featured in soundbite interviews speak for all or even a majority of LGBT people from back in the day? Read some of the work of Gertrude Stein. She loved many movies, books and plays even if they had no lesbian characters with whom she could identify.

The Celluloid Closet gives me the false impression that every single person who ever performed a same - sex act had the same emotional reaction to sitting through a movie that alluded to opposite sex relationships only during its 90 minutes, two hours or four hours (i.e. Gone With The Wind). The documentary insinuates that all these categorized people, including everyone who has been labeled a closeted gay by some gay historians (and who committed suicide like Hemingway), secretly longed to sit through a two - hour movie starring a sympathetic "gay" character. They would have loved to see and hear James Baldwin's David from the 1956 book Giovanni's Room or to see and hear Gertrude Stein's persona ... but no! Hollywood studio moguls like Jack Warner forced them to think that homosexuality (people? acts?) was twisted.

The studio executives in Hollywood forced millions of these poor emotionally suffering people to watch a lot of "heterosexual" characters and a few twisted "homosexual" ones. The moviegoers' inner turmoil increased until some committed suicide and others became nasty, hateful queens like Perez Hilton.

I don't buy that. For one thing, what about the millions of secondary characters whose sexuality never was alluded to ? Like the characters Tony Randall played in several Rock Hudson films ? What about Eve Arden? She was a star of a television sitcom who had an occasional boyfriend there, but in movies she was a supporting character who rarely, if ever, paired with the leading man in the end. Does that mean she was supposed to be gay like Selma Blair's character of Vivian allegedly was (not verified) in Legally Blonde?

Secondly, people who were annoyed by a lot of movies in the 1950s and 1960s were being told by their parents and schoolteachers to read books, instead. James Baldwin created "David" for millions of people to enjoy in 1956. There was no Internet to distract you from reading. These are more reasons I am tired of hearing about an alleged anti - gay holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s -- featuring a few invisible Americans who were a lot like Joseph Goebbels.

I know some nice older gay men who were perfectly happy to identify with "heterosexual" characters -- especially female ones like Dolly Levi -- throughout decades of movie watching. Lesbians, in particular, have been known to savor any movie or book whose protagonist is female. "Women are women," said Gloria Steinem in the early 1970s when Rita Mae Brown asked her if lesbians might ruin the women's movement. Then you have the Civil War reenactment lesbians, mostly on the East Coast. They never say the reason for Mary Lincoln's issues was that she was a closeted lesbian. They don't care what she did in private.

For these reasons people should take The Celluloid Closet with a grain of salt. It's trying to prove that millions of LGBT people felt this way or that in movie theaters during the evil 1950s and 1960s. That's very speculative.