The reading makes an interesting point, that people make an automatic assumption that all gay people must have some element of performance to their identity. The author’s description of typical gay heartthrobs of the time as being very different from Hudson’s look at the time (muscle man or youth) is interesting, considering he fit perfectly into the female ideal of male beauty. There was nothing subversive about his public image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Hudson
Watching Lover Come Back fifty nine years after it was first released was certainly interesting. The sexual rules were inflexible. Every woman seemed to be drunk, naive, or nagging. The men are lecherous, manipulative, and power hungry. The tidy ending was essentially shocking based on all the character’s behavior and actions. Romantic comedies from this time seem to rely on single-dimension characterization, and on the surface Hudson’s characterization is the same. He has sexual prowess, women love him, he is confident, he is educated, he is successful, and he knows that other men aspire to be these things. He used these skills to pull himself out of poverty. Hudson’s character is the American dream. As the reading points out, it is only in hindsight that Hudson’s movies become more complex, knowing that the entire time that he was a gay man playing a straight man.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rock-Hudson
Many female celebrities of the time seem to be stereotype-defying in some way. For example, Marilyn Monroe was hyper-sexualized; not the ideal housewife, the physical manifestation of heterosexual male fantasy. Hudson’s image was that of a benign (if mischievous and playful) society-approved husband material. His studio supposedly arranged his marriage to his only wife. This is also in contrast to celebrities of similar caliber of the time: Marilyn Monroe was married three times, Doris Day was married four times, Paul Newman twice, Clark Gable five times and John Wayne three times. A single, very short marriage certainly seems atypical.
https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/listened-marilyn-monroe-die-secret-files-hollywood-p-revealed-article-1.1365189
The reading from this week makes me wonder just how many people knew about Hudson’s sexual orientation, and how it was kept a secret. I read that his studio covered up an expose that a magazine was about to release about his homosexuality by releasing dirty information on two other celebrities at the studio. This makes it seem that at least studio officials knew the truth. It seems likely that others in Hollywood society would have also known.The reading implies that many of Hudson’s sex comedies have plots which rely on sexual ambiguity, even though several of his romantic comedies portray him as a serial womanizer. His characters often lacked some characteristic that would have allowed him to be seen as the heterosexual ideal of manliness. Was this purposeful? I would think that to completely obscure any trace of Hudson’s true sexual orientation, his studio would do all it could to cast Hudson in roles as stereotypically straight as possible. So how was it that it was not until his death from AIDS-related complications that it became public knowledge that he was gay?