The new closet for deceased Old Hollywood stars.

Someone who I respect overall has a podcast I follow (and authored a book I’m currently reading).  The podcast is being carried through Slate.com, which advertises a new episode as follows:

Rumors have circulated for decades, but the business of outing long-dead celebrities can be complicated and even harmful.

Apparently, the new rule with biographers is to re-create the kind of closet celebrities stayed in during the era when there were all kinds of professional and personal penalties for daring to come out (an exception is the new Rock Hudson bio ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS by Mark Griffin).  Oft-rumored bi-or-gay actors such as Barbara Stanwyck and Spencer Tracy are now written about as thoroughly heterosexual (with Tracy’s latest biographer, James Curtis, doing a long, loud denunciation of gay rumors in the acknowledgements section of allegedly intimate book SPENCER TRACY).

As a corollary to this form of apparent straight-washing, biographers make a public show of sticking out their literary tongues at authors who, for better or worse, write extensively on the subject of deceased closeted actors (prominent among them are Boze Hadleigh, Darwin Porter and Scotty Bowers).

In closing, the podcaster/author balks at too much discussion of “long-dead celebrities” in the midst of doing a series arc debunking the mostly-untrue salacious myths of Kenneth Anger’s first HOLLYWOOD BABYLON volume.  And this person is, at the same time, promoting a book which keeps the apparently “complicated” sexual life of its subject quite hetero-simple.

It may be one thing if surviving descendants of a celebrity wish to keep certain private incidents eternally hidden from public/media scrutiny.  But it’s quite another for authors to produce inaccurate/accurate within limits (but commercially appealing) history which treats readers as if they’re uniformly infantile bluenoses who want books to be as adoring and stress-free as promotional shorts for TCM.