The Queer Movie Poster Book by writer and filmmaker Jenni Olson is a colorful and often amusing look back at many of the images that have represented—or misrepresented—queer people over the past century. Olson’s survey is admirably balanced between films about gay men and films about lesbians, even though she points out that films about men have always outnumbered those about women, straight or gay. The book is divided into chapters by decade, with each poster accompanied by a brief paragraph exploring its imagery and significance.

Beginning her survey with the silent film era, Olson explains that Hollywood was largely censored due to the notorious Production Code from 1930 to 1961. However, some films about gays and lesbians made it into American theaters, including the German film Maedchen in Uniform (1931), about a romance between a schoolgirl and her female teacher, which has the distinction of being the first lesbian film made.

After the Production Code was lifted lesbians and gays began to appear in more films, but generally as perverts, psychopaths, or deviants who were to be pitied. A prime example of the latter was the Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine version of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1961). In this film, two schoolteachers are accused by a student of being lesbians, and MacLaine’s character, Martha, eventually ends up committing suicide. The marketing campaign for The Children’s Hour used many of the same tricks used to advertise other films about lesbians in this time period, including line drawings of nude women, lavender backgrounds, downcast or averted eyes, and the words “different” or “strange” prominently featured.

The 1960s also saw the release of hundreds of soft-core “dykesploitation” films that appealed to straight men’s fantasies, such as Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterly (1967). Many of these movies featured a “real” lesbian who had an affair with a temporarily straight (or bi-curious) woman, who typically went back to heterosexuality by the end of the movie.

Some of the funniest images from The Queer Movie Poster Book are in this section, including the press kit for the dykesploitation flick Chained Girls (1965), which contains extremely suspect yet hilarious statistics about lesbianism. Apparently “33% of female single college graduates are lesbians,” and the film promises to feature “shackled women in unashamed love making!”

Olson notes that while the majority of dykesploitation movies were not positive representations of lesbianism, a few of them actually mentioned the existence of a lesbian community and suggested marketing to them—something that Hollywood did not begin doing in earnest until the 1990s.

The continued negativity in representations of gays and lesbians on the big screen played an important part in galvanizing the gay rights movement, and in the 1980s positive portrayals began to be seen, most notably for lesbians in the classic romance Desert Hearts (1986). By the 1990s, mainstream production companies had acknowledged the advantages of marketing to lesbians and gays as niche audiences.

For example, the posters for Bound (1996) and High Art (1997) feature the lesbian couples looking directly out at the camera, suggesting that they have been interrupted in the middle of a makeout session. In comparison to the downcast eyes of The Children’s Hour, these images are incredibly out and proud.

In addition to tracing the development of queer movie posters over time, Olson highlights several interesting sub-categories of queer movie posters, including films about bisexuality, transgender issues, and queers of color. The bisexual movies included tend to be about a woman and two men, and rarely actually grapple with what it means to be bisexual, but the section on queers of color points out several films that are worth taking a look at, including The Watermelon Woman (1996). This film, which starred Cheryl Dunye and Guinevere Turner, was the first and remains the only African American lesbian feature to be theatrically released in the US.

Many of the early films about transgenderism were extremely lurid and tabloidesque (the poster for The Christine Jorgensen Story asks “Did the surgeon’s knife make me a woman or a freak?”), but films about transgendered people have also arguably made the most progress. Olson points out that two of the three Oscars awarded to actors playing queer roles were for transgender portrayals: William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1984) and Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry (1999). (The third Oscar was awarded to Tom Hanks for Philadelphia).

Overall, The Queer Movie Poster Book is more than mere eye candy. It’s definitely the perfect coffee-table book, suitable for flipping through at random or as a cocktail-party conversation piece, but it also provides a valuable visual history of queer culture in the movies. The only drawback is that it doesn’t contain more posters—Olson often tantalizingly mentions that a film was marketed with several different posters, but she rarely shows multiple versions. Let’s hope there’s a demand for The Queer Movie Poster Book 2: Rare B-Sides.

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