As I write this, certain bitchy killjoys are trying to roll the state back to 1950 with HF 341, a bill to undo the 1993 Human Rights Amendment. Imagine my surprise when I found some comfort in a book about the movies.

Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall is a history of gay images, scenes and characters in American film from 1912 to the 1970s. No, that first date isn’t a typo, and that’s one of the main points of the book: People like us have been showing up in American movies for a lot longer than we think.

Now, if you’ve seen or read Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, you may be wondering, “Hasn’t this been done before?” It has and it hasn’t, and author Richard Barrios realized that while researching for his first book, a history of the early years of musicals. Barrios watched a lot of films from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s for that book, and the more he watched, the more apparently gay characters and situations he saw. He soon realized that, groundbreaking and influential as Russo’s work was, its scope was more limited than he’d known. “As worthy and vital as The Celluloid Closet was…it isn’t the whole story. Russo never intended it to be,” he writes in his introduction.

Barrios decided to tell more of that story. With the help of a small network of friends, Barrios began looking for movies with gay imagery or characterization that seemed deliberate. With each incidence he found, he looked at original film scripts, contemporary reviews, and uncensored prints of the films.

Often, his research told him what he already suspected: The imagery was deliberate.

“Basically, if you see an old movie and you think ‘this seems gay to me,’ chances are that’s how they intended it,” says Barrios. (Those of you who enjoy watching The Maltese Falcon for the gay subtext, feel free to giggle here.) “We tend to think that the times were different then, but when you look at the scripts and the Production Code files, it becomes clear that that’s exactly what they meant.”

Sometimes scholarly, sometimes catty, always detailed, Screened Out describes how the film industry’s fare has been impacted by social and cultural forces. It tells how religious groups began agitating for a code of morality to control movie content in 1929, and how the formulation of the Production Code actually resulted in more, not fewer, gay images until it was strengthened in 1935. Refreshingly, it describes how filmmakers, who often either knew gays and lesbians in the industry or were gay themselves, openly defied the Code by showing gay couples in crowd scenes or including gay in-jokes and disguised characters.

Barrios then tells the sometimes depressing, sometimes uplifting tale of how anti-Semitism, institutionalized spirituality, and corporate fear and miscalculation brought the Code into being. When it was strengthened in 1935, the Code changed the film industry—but not entirely for the worse, and Barrios’ account shows the results. Although gays and lesbians became less a part of film, they didn’t vanish entirely, because stubborn filmmakers found ever more coded words or images to tip off viewers in the know that there was a pansy or a dyke in the woodpile. They also played an elaborate (and often successful) game of bait-and-switch with the Hays Office—the enforcement arm of the Code— by inserting obviously objectionable material in their films to distract the censors from the material they wanted to keep.

The book strives to put all this history into its proper context, particularly the nature of the gay imagery he researched. He offers a new perspective on the nature of those portrayals, arguing that they are less unkind or negative than we might think from our 21st-century perspective. Although suit-coated women with slicked-back hair and effeminate men overly concerned with draperies and flowers aren’t the be-all and end-all of gay existence today, in the times that they appeared—principally the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s—they did represent some historical truth. “A lot of the ‘pansy’ and ‘dyke’ stereotypes came from gay and out people who presented themselves that way,” he says.

Barrios is careful to note that the homophobia and vitriol that so defined the films in The Celluloid Closet actually didn’t start to show up until the noir films of the 1940s—and even then, the negativity was a cultivated phenomenon. By censoring positive or even neutral portrayals, and allowing gay characters to appear when they were evil or were punished for their perverse ways, the Hays Office shaped and reinforced a PR problem that would haunt the gay community for decades. Left to its own devices, the film industry might have yielded a more balanced, less damaging picture—but the Hays Office used its favorite tool of censorship to make sure that didn’t happen.

Depressing as it is to be reminded of this, and to read about the days when religious nuts effectively whitewashed us out of American culture, the payoff is in knowing that their efforts ultimately failed. The Code censors kept effeminate men and references to the word “lavender” and “pansy” out of the movies for years—but today, it’s fun to picture how they would react to a Jack-heavy episode of Will & Grace. We haven’t won yet, but without the Hays Office to stack the deck, someday we just might.