Page "LGBT culture" Paragraph 12

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, gay culture was highly covert and relied upon secret symbols and codes woven into an overall straight context.

Gay influence in early America was mostly limited to high culture.

The association of gay men with opera, ballet, couture, fine cuisine, musical theater, the Golden Age of Hollywood, and interior design began with wealthy homosexual men using the straight themes of these media to send their own signals.

In the very heterocentric Marilyn Monroe film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical number features Jane Russell singing " Anyone Here for Love " in a gym while muscled men dance around her.

The men's costumes were designed by a man, the dance was choreographed by a man, and the dancers, as gay screenwriter Paul Rudnick points out, " seem more interested in each other than in Russell ", but her reassuring presence gets the sequence past the censors and fits it into an overall heterocentric theme.