Race on the set (and off).

Smith, Charles Michael

Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood

by Donald Bogle

Ballantine Books / One World. 411 pages, $26.

THE FIRST TIME I read an acknowledgment of gay black Hollywood was in Paula L. Woods's Stormy Weather, the second in a series of mystery novels featuring the African-American LAPD detective Charlotte Justice, whose gay uncle was a part of that scene. However, historians and film scholars, both black and white, have usually acted as if black gay men and lesbians did not exist anywhere in Hollywood, even though black gay characters have appeared in numerous film and TV productions. Reams have been written about Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, Montgomery Clift, and directors James Whale and George Cukor. But what of their black counterparts?

Fortunately, that's beginning to change, albeit slowly, and now Donald Bogle's Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams is here to speed up the process. Although its main focus is not about gay black Hollywood, the book names a number of prominent gay people, some of whom merit a full-length biography. The book covers the years from the 1910's to the 1950's. It begins with D. W. Griffith's racist paean to the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation (1915), and ends with the musical Porgy and Bess (1959).

When filmmaking moved from New York to California in the teens, Los Angeles was "a sleepy western kind of country town" that it transformed into "a company town that exuded glamour--along with extravagance and excess." In the 1920's, as LA's population grew, so did the city's racial segregation, to the point where restrictive covenants were created to forbid white homeowners from selling their houses to blacks or other minorities. These restrictive covenants brought about a thriving black community that supported black-owned businesses like hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs along Central Avenue, the main thoroughfare. And since blacks in the film industry could only live among other blacks, "poverty and prosperity existed side by side on Central Avenue."

For all its uniqueness, Hollywood was a microcosm of the larger American society, not only in the narrow range of screen roles given to black actors, who could only portray maids, butlers, and chauffeurs, but also in the day-to-day activities on the lot. Socially, there was no mixing of blacks and whites in the commissary. Also forbidden was interracial romance, both onscreen and off. "An interracial marriage," writes Bogle, "would spell the death of a white star's career." Homosexuality also fell into the forbidden zone, especially onscreen. But that didn't mean that sexual advances weren't made by men toward other men: "These were the years when many young women--and some young men--were introduced to the casting couch." And since at the time there were no women in executive positions at the studios, those young men were obviously propositioned by other men.

There's no doubt that Ben Carter, an African-American casting agent (and sometime actor and comic), who was responsible for hiring black film extras and who was "at the center of early gay Black Hollywood," took full advantage of his powerful position. Bogle writes of Carter: "Opening the doors of his home for a steady flow of guests, male and female, he might have one eye on his guests, in general, and another on a candidate for a little mischief later in the evening."

Another prominent member of gay black Hollywood was actor Joel Fluellen (1910-1990) "who, like Carter, came to know an array of major stars, black and white." Known to be "[a]dept at reassuring troubled women of their appeal and allure," which included "a boozy Billie Holiday and an even boozier Nina Mae McKinney." Other gay and lesbian luminaries pop up throughout the book, notably Ethel Waters, Alvin Ailey, composer-arranger Roger Edens, choreographer Jack Cole, and Bessie Smith. In Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 (2001), William Mann states that actress Hattie McDaniel of Gone With the Wind fame had "an ongoing, committed, intimate relationship ... with another woman." Nowhere does Bogle mention this. The only romantic relationships that he writes about are those she had with men. Was Mann referring to Ruby Berkley Goodwin, a black journalist, who later became McDaniel's personal secretary? About Ethel Waters Bogle leaves no doubt. He notes "her stormy relationships with men and women" and that she "lavished gifts on her women."

Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams is a riveting historical account of early black Hollywood that's an emotional roller-coaster, carrying the reader from excitement to sadness to anger to joy and back again. Bogle, a noted film scholar who teaches at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and at the University of Pennsylvania, has avoided an overly academic or pedantic style in favor of one that's highly readable and entertaining. In addition to a factual history, Bogle has captured a sense of what life was like to be an African-American in the early days of Hollywood.

Charles Michael Smith is a writer living in New York City.