Bringing Up Baby (1938) Queer Film A-

DIRECTOR: Howard Hawks.

In Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant answers the front door wearing a filmy negligée because Katharine Hepburn has hidden all his clothes. When Hepburn’s aunt (May Robson) demands an explanation, he throws up his hands and exclaims, Because I just went gay all of a sudden! — leaping into the air on the word gay. The film never again suggests that Grant’s character is gay, queer, or homosexual, which raises the linguistic question: how common was gay as a synonym for homosexuality in 1938?

The answer is that the usage existed but was not yet mainstream. By the late 1930s, gay, meaning “homosexual,” circulated widely in queer subcultures but remained largely unknown to the general public, who still heard the word as “carefree” or “frivolous.” Grant’s line therefore functions as a sly double entendre—innocent enough to slip past censors, unmistakable to those in the know.

Grant plays a paleontologist who becomes entangled with a scatterbrained heiress (Hepburn) and a leopard named Baby. The film represents the peak of Hollywood’s slapstick era, with Grant taking several classic tumbles. Adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from Wilde’s short story, first published in Collier’s Weekly on April 10, 1937, it remains one of Hawks’s most anarchic and subversive comedies.

Cinematography: Russell Metty

RKO

REMADE WITH BARBRA STREISAND AND RYAN O’NEILL BY PETER BOGDANOVICH AS “WHAT’S UP DOC” IN 1972.

STREAMING: YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+

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