This weekend it snowed and I decided to stay inside and cook and watch old movies on Netflix. It’s become difficult for me to watch anything made since the late 60′s or so; I’m going through a grumpy old lady phase. What strikes me is how incredibly perverted the films of the 50′s and early 60′s were, and I wondered what that must have looked like to viewers who may not have had a language for talking and thinking openly about queer sexualities.

Obviously the writers of the movies (and of the plays and books that became movies) of this era knew they were introducing characters who were in some sense queer. The actors seem to know precisely what they’re communicating. But for the popular viewer, how much did they know? How did they see these films? What did they think was happening in them? It’s so appealing. I don’t mean the censorship itself, but the sly, subtle representations of bubbling subconscious—who can resist?

One of the things I keep finding are scenes in which two cohabitating people argue about one of them creating too much clutter, not going out and working or seeing other people. There is an erotic communication behind each one. One partner is holed up in the house, drinking too much and making a mess, and demanding that the other partner must love him anyway. The other comes home to clean up the mess, marching around and demanding changes that will never happen. This is, I think, one way that repressed queer desire gets to say what it wants. It says, look at me and love me with all my filth. And it says, I can only love you with all the filth removed from view.

In the very charming 1961 film Goodbye Again, Ingrid Bergman plays a 40-year-old interior decorator in Paris whose boyfriend Yves Montand is constantly cancelling plans to chase after idiotic twentysomethings. So when the plainly insane 25-year-old Anthony Perkins appears and begins declaring his passionate (and clearly Oedipal) love for her, she puts up a heroic and hysterical effort to resist before being terrorized into giving it a go. As one might predict, he’s obsessive and perverse, and wants to make their affair as public as possible, in ways that expose her as just as queer as he is. One day she comes home to find him drunkenly napping and sulking, and threatens to break up with him, with bizarre results:

Here’s a very different version of the same scene, but doubled, in the disturbing 1963 film The Servant. James Fox plays a dissipated upper-class young man who hires an extremely traditional-seeming manservant, Dirk Bogarde, who subtly invades his private life and destroys his chances of marriage and success. Once he realizes he’s been duped, in a truly shocking scene, he finds he is too dependent on the servant to dispense with him. Instead, the two enter an intense contest of wills in which each man takes a turn accusing the other of being filthy as a way of asserting his dominance:

These scenes of filth and confrontation have more erotic content than a thousand frozen-mouthed Hays-Code kisses. By the time both of these films were made, sexual subjects—even queer ones—had already begun to be explored in mainstream cinema in fairly unambiguous ways. The plays Suddenly Last Summer and The Children’s Hour were made into films in 1959 and 1961, respectively, and both plots hinge entirely on gay sexual desire. There was a new explicitness available about queerness. But I think what I love especially about movies of the late 50′s and early 60′s is the persistence of queer content presented in Freudian semaphore.

What did average filmgoers see when they saw these movies? My mother was only a teenager when she saw The Servant, but she claims she developed a searingly painful erotic obsession with Dirk Bogarde, and, if one believes the hundreds of obsessive sexual fantasies typed into YouTube comments about Anthony Perkins in Goodbye Again, I think perhaps that film may have functioned similarly for others.

I don’t want to knock explicitness. I love explicitness. But there’s something about not saying what you mean that requires a sublimely creative—and perverted—imagination.