Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
For generations, members of the LGBTQ+ community in Hollywood needed to be discreet about their lives but—make no mistake—they were everywhere, both in front of and behind the camera.
On the eve of the twentieth century, in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, one of the earliest attempts at a sound film depicted two men dancing together as a third plays the violin. It’s only a few minutes long, but this cornerstone of early cinema captured a queer moment on film. It would not be the last.
With Hollywood Pride, renowned film critic Alonso Duralde presents a history spanning from the dawn of cinema through the “pansy craze” of the 1930s and the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, all the way up to today. He showcases the hard-working actors, writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, art directors, and choreographers whose achievements defined the American film industry and charts the evolution of LGBTQ+ storytelling itself—the way mainstream Hollywood decided it would portray (or erase) their lives and the narratives created by queer filmmakers who fought to tell those stories themselves.
Along the way, readers will encounter a fascinating cast of characters, such as the first generation of queer actors, including J. Warren Kerrigan, Ramon Novarro, and William Haines. Early cinema pioneers like Alla Nazimova and F. W. Murnau helped shape the new medium of moving pictures. The sex symbols, both male (Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and Anthony Perkins) and female (Lizabeth Scott and Greta Garbo), lived under the threat of their private lives undermining their public personas. Underground filmmakers Kenneth Anger and John Waters made huge strides in LGBTQ+ representation with their off-off-Hollywood productions in the 1960s and ’70s. These screen legends paved the way for every openly queer figure in Hollywood today.
Illustrated with more than 175 full-color and black-and-white images, Hollywood Pride points to the bright future of LGBTQ+ representation in cinema by revealing the story of the community’s inclusion and erasure, its visibility and invisibility, and its triumphs and tragedies.
Alonso Duralde is Chief US Film Critic for The Film Verdict, author of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, and coauthor of I’ll Be Home for Christmas Movies. He is the cohost of the Linoleum Knife, Maximum Film!, and Breakfast All Day podcasts, and has discussed film on CNN, PBS, TCM, and ABC, as well as in numerous documentaries.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"I feel comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life... I object!" Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz in Legally Blonde, 2001
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He has launched a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater. On October 3-6, 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre!
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.