Q&A and Book Talk with author, critic, and curator Michael Koresky

Tuesday, Jul. 22 2025, 7:00

• Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness: A blazingly original history celebrating the persistence of queerness onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the dark days of the Hollywood Production Code. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code severely restricted what Hollywood cinema could depict. This included “any inference” to the lives of homosexuals. In a landmark 1981 book, gay activist Vito Russo famously condemned Hollywood's censorship regime, lambasting many midcentury films as the bigoted products of a “celluloid closet.” But there is more to these movies than meets the eye. In this insightful, wildly entertaining book, cinema historian Michael Koresky finds new meaning in "problematic” classics of the Code era like Hitchcock's Rope, Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy, and—bookending the period and anchoring Koresky's narrative—William Wyler's two adaptations of The Children's Hour, Lillian Hellman's provocative hit play about a pair of schoolteachers accused of lesbianism.
• Michael Koresky is the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness (Bloomsbury), Films of Endearment (Hanover Square Press), and Terence Davies (University of Illinois Press, Contemporary Film Directors). Koresky is the Senior Curator of Film at New York's Museum of the Moving Image. Previously he was Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy for Film at Lincoln Center; Director of Publications and Marketing for New York's Metrograph Theater; and Managing Editor and Staff Writer for The Criterion Collection. He continues to write for The Criterion Collection, and is the host and curator of the Criterion Channel series Queersighted. He has also written for Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Cinema Scope, The Village Voice, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, and Filmmaker, and he co-founded and edits Reverse Shot, a Museum of the Moving Image publication (“An online film journal whose continued existence asserts the vibrancy of both films and journals.” —The Wall Street Journal). Koresky was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture" by Brooklyn Magazine in 2016.

Tickets: $15 (members), $20 (nonmembers)

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