‘What’s important is being in the room’: Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood and the politics of queer history

Abstract

In his 2020 Netflix miniseries Hollywood, producer Ryan Murphy presents us with an almost utopian version of Hollywood, an alternate history that centres queer and Black voices over the realities of the repressive queerphobic and racist nature of the 1940s US society. It tells the story of an ultimately Oscar-winning film project surrounding the story of the real-life suicide of silent movie actress Peg Entwistle, put together by marginalized creators. In many ways, the miniseries commits to the screen a classic narrative of the American dream, of the marginalized overcoming adversity and ‘making it big’. It frames Hollywood as aspirational, both as an actual physical place but also as fantastical space, using strategies borrowed from theme parks and other immersive spaces. It is unusual in centring Black, queer and Black queer voices in this story, and by extension in history – in time and space(s) where they are usually erased. It makes use of nostalgia in manifold ways to do so, showcasing it as a tool that presents both opportunities and dangers when applied to marginalized communities. As such, it emerges as a liberal fairy tale espousing the virtues of individual action over collective activism against systemic injustices, and champions a politics of visibility rooted in whiteness. This article interrogates the potentiality of popular culture, and this text of historical television specifically, for reinscribing queer people into US public memory. To do so, it discusses the Disneyfication of Hollywood in the series and how it shapes our perception of the past, ideas of marginalized nostalgia(s) for queer and BiPoC (and queer BiPoC), and the role celebrity/star figures play for constructing history on-screen.