Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender History Month

February marks the first ever Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) History month in the UK, and to coincide with this important event there will be a modest display of books in the library throughout the month reflecting the history of queer cinema.

The queer on screen is often hidden in shadows, masked in different guises and costumes, and is rarely allowed space to simply be lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Some of the books in our display examine these hidden portrayals, as it's only by exposing the queer screen that we realise there is such a thing in the first place. Wayne Bryant's Bisexual characters in film is a good place to start an exploration of the space queers occupy in our cinemas. Accompany that by flicking through Alexander Doty's Flaming Classics and an education of LGBT cinema is off to a positive start.

It's not just on-screen portrayals that are important to expose and discuss, equally important to LGBT history are the men and women who worked and continue to work, behind the camera helping to create all sorts of characters on screen, some of them queer, some not. Judith Mayne's book Directed by Dorothy Arzner, is the first book length examination Arzner's work. It was an open secret in Hollywood that Arnzer was a lesbian, and her status as the first successful woman film director in studio era Hollywood as well as her 'out' sexuality places her as a major figure in LGBT History. The same can be said for more recent film-makers, such as the late Derek Jarman, whose Modern nature: the journals of Derek Jarman are on display alongside a book about Spain's foremost gay film-maker Pedro Almodóvar, by Mark Allinson called A Spanish labyrinth.

But it is not just film-makers that shape our views of what it is to be queer, and have an impact on our history. It is the actors and actresses who we believe, or know for a fact to be queer, who can make a pivotal difference as we try and define ourselves, and our LGBT lives. Diana McLellan's The girls: Sappho goes to Hollywood has everything you ever wanted to know about the lesbians of the silver screen, and Boze Hadleigh's entertaining Hollywood Gays offers the same kind of expose for the gay men of Tinsel Town.

Bbibliography on Lesbian and Gay cinema.

The bfi National Library is proud to be part of the UK's first LGBT History month. For more information visit the LGBT History month website.

Reading List

ALLINSON, Mark

A Spanish labyrinth: the films of Pedro Almodóvar.

London ; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2001.

vi-x,258p.; illus.,appendices,bibliog.,index.

ISBN 1860645070

BRYANT, Wayne M.

Bisexual characters in film: from Anaïs to Zee.

Binghamton , NY: Haworth Press, 1997.

ix-xiii, 186p. bibliog. indices.

ISBN 078900142X

DOTY, Alexander

Flaming classics: queering the film canon.

New York ; London: Routledge, 2000.

194p.; illus. index.

ISBN 041592345X

HADLEIGH, Boze

Hollywood gays: conversations with: Cary Grant, Liberace, Tony Perkins, Paul Lynde, Cesar Romero, Brad Davis, Randolph Scott, James Coco, William Haines, David Lewis.

New York : Barricade Books, 1996.

384p. [16]plates. index.

ISBN 1569800839

HADLEIGH, Boze

Hollywood lesbians.

New York : Barricade Books, 1994.

272p. [16] plates. index.

ISBN 1569800146

JARMAN, Derek

Modern nature: the journals of Derek Jarman.

London : Century, 1991.

314p. [16] plates.

ISBN 0712621849

JOHNSON, Phylis A. and KEITH, Michael C.

Queer airwaves: the story of gay and lesbian broadcasting.

New York : M.E. Sharpe, 2001. - xi, 298 p.; index.

(Media, communication, and culture in America)

ISBN 0765604000

MCLELLAN, Diana

The girls: Sappho goes to Hollywood.

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000.

vii-xxiii, 440p.; [16] plates. index.

ISBN 0312246471

MANN, William J

Behind the screen: how gays and lesbians shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969.

New York : Viking, 2001.

xxiv, 422p.; illus. [16] plates. notes. bibliog. index.

ISBN 0670030171

MARTIN, Fran

Situating sexualities: queer representation in Taiwanese fiction, film and public culture.

Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.

vi, 358 p.; illus. notes. bibliog. index.

ISBN 9622096190

MAYNE, Judith

Directed by Dorothy Arzner.

Bloomington ; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

209p. illus. filmog. index.

(Women Artists in Film)

ISBN 0253208963

MORRIS, Bonnie J.

Girl reel: memoir: a lesbian remembers growing up at the movies.

Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2000.

166p.

ISBN 156890942

TINKCOM, Matthew

Working like a homosexual: camp, capital, cinema.

Durham , NC; London: Duke University Press, 2002.

x, 226 p.; illus. bibliog. index.

(Series Q)

ISBN 0822328895

VANITA, Ruth and WAUGH, Thomas

Queering india: same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society.

New York ; London: Routledge, 2002.

252 p.; illus. index.

ISBN 0415929504