A new film in limited release shows what life was like for LGBT celebrities, who until fairly recently couldn’t be open about their identities. The Los Angeles Times reminds us: “Though Hollywood is now seen (sometimes unfavorably) as a liberal bastion, it wasn’t always that way. For lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, life in Hollywood up until the early 1990s — and perhaps, in some ways, still today — was a game of smoke and mirrors, hiding parts of themselves in public for fear of losing their jobs, being harassed by the police or worse.”
“Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood,” a documentary produced by Matt Tyrnauer, portrays the life and times of Scotty Bowers, who “ran a brothel of sorts out of a gas station in the shadow of industry studios on Hollywood Boulevard. He says he’d set up himself and others with some of Hollywood’s biggest players whom he says were in the closet — towering icons from the Golden Age including Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner.”
