Yes, there are classics that allude to homosexuality - Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Rope, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot - and a handful that are slightly more direct in their queer suppositions - Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour - but gay movies are essentially a 40-year-old phenomenon. What’s interesting is that in the history of cinema, explicitly queer movies didn’t really venture into the cultural landscape until the mid-’70s, coming to full fruition in the mid-’80s and, especially, ’90s.
