The Loop: Gene Kelly, the Closet, and the Composition of Rumor
Betsy Blair was an actress, a leftist, a survivor of the blacklist, a woman who understood how Hollywood worked and what it cost. When she wrote her memoir, The Memory of All That, she was careful. She noted that during their courtship and early marriage, Gene Kelly had little interest in sex. She noted that he consistently brought a particular friend along on their dates, their vacations, their private time together — a blond, slight playwright and rehearsal pianist named Dick Dwenger, Gene’s best friend and intellectual anchor, the person Blair said was there to keep Gene from losing sight of who he was. When Dwenger was killed in World War II, Gene was devastated in a way that took a long time to name. She didn’t name it. She left the space.
No relationship between Gene Kelly and a man was ever confirmed. No one came forward. No evidence surfaced. In all likelihood, Gene Kelly was not gay. And yet the space Blair left in that memoir has never fully closed. It sits there, between the lines, in the double-spacing she knew exactly how to use. That space is the closet. And the closet, once opened, doesn’t require proof. It requires only a rumor. A pause. A question left unanswered.
The Best of Places, The Worst of Places
Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with a paradox about a time of violence so extreme it produced its opposite in equal measure — the best and worst existing not in sequence but simultaneously, in the same moment, in the same city, in the same body. Hollywood in its classical period was exactly that for gay men. The most intoxicating visual feast ever produced and the most systematically hostile cultural institution in American life, operating at the same time, on the same soundstages, with the same people.
The studio system produced images of male beauty at an industrial scale. Bodies lit by the greatest cinematographers who ever worked. Narratives that permitted physical intimacy between men under the cover of comedy, athleticism, and masculine camaraderie. And simultaneously, through the Production Code enforced from 1934 through 1968, it explicitly prohibited the existence of the men producing those images. “Sex perversion” was the operative term. Gay actors, directors, designers, and choreographers built the dream factory from the inside while the factory held their lives over their heads.
The two figures in boater hats in the collage are Gene and Fred Kelly — brothers, Pittsburgh-born dancers who had performed together since childhood. Their only on-screen appearance together came in Deep in My Heart (1954), an MGM musical biography of operetta composer Sigmund Romberg, built around lavish cameo performances by virtually every major talent on the lot. Gene and Fred appear in a specialty number called “I Love to Go Swimmin’ with Wimmen” — ebullient, physical, two brothers sharing a rare moment on film together. The number is all charm and energy and masculine ease. Nothing in it would raise a single flag. That was precisely how Hollywood worked.
The irony runs deeper than the frame. Sigmund Romberg spent his entire career writing operettas built around impossible, forbidden, and doomed love — The Student Prince, a prince who falls for a commoner he can never marry; The Desert Song, desire operating entirely under disguise and false identity; The New Moon, longing in exile. His life’s work is the emotional vocabulary of the closet: love that cannot speak its name, dressed in conventions that made it acceptable to a mainstream audience. Gay men were in those audiences for decades. They recognized something. The Kelly brothers are dancing inside a tribute to the composer who spent his career writing music for everything Hollywood would not allow anyone to say out loud.
Turner Classic Movies runs the films. It does not note what it is also running: the most comprehensive document of institutionalized violence against queer people in American cultural history. For those who know how to read it, every frame is evidence.
And Gene Kelly — athletic, masculine, three times married, politically courageous during the McCarthy era, the least likely candidate by every surface measure — was not immune. Because the closet doesn’t require guilt. It requires only suspicion. A rumor alone was enough to pull any man in Hollywood inside it, regardless of who he actually was or who he actually loved. Gay, straight, bisexual: the net caught everyone. That was the point. That was always the point.
The Emotional Loop: The Closet Made Visible
The collage contains a major compositional moment, both visual and emotional. A loop sweeps through the center of the image, and what it encloses is not accidental. The bodybuilding figures form the perimeter of that loop. They swirl around the Kelly brothers. They close in from every direction. They are the rumor. They are the net. They are the closet rendered as composition.
The loop doesn’t hold the eye. It holds the meaning. It says: this is what it felt like. To be Gene Kelly, or to be anyone near Gene Kelly, in a system that ran on suspicion and silence and the careful double-spacing of a smart woman’s memoir.
The Subdivision | Digital Photo Collage | Behan
Sources: The Motion Picture Production Code (1930, enforced 1934); Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (1981); Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images (1993); Betsy Blair, The Memory of All That (2003)
