In the American theater of the 1930s and 1940s, the designation “queer star” was an oxymoron – except when applied to Clifton Webb. The Indiana-born singer and dancer was (according to colleagues) homosexual and (according to critics and audiences) queer. He was also, after 1932, a star on Broadway and the road as well as a reliably queer presence in the gossip columns and arts pages of the daily paper. Unlike any other show business personality of his rank, he used his star text to raise the visibility of queerness in early twentieth-century entertainment culture.

This article examines the place of the past in Charles Sheeler's photographs and paintings made in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, around 1917, in New York City during the 1920s, and in the short film of New York, Manhatta (1921), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. It situates these works in the context of the scholarship on Sheeler and on the art of New York in the early twentieth century, in particular that of the Ashcan School and of visual representation which attends to the architectural fabric of the city in preference to depicting its inhabitants. The article argues that although the scholarship has identified Sheeler's interest in making connections with the American past, it has not recognized the fraught nature of that relationship. By looking at the Doylestown and New York pictures, the analysis demonstrates how the problematic status of the past for Sheeler appears in these works as hauntings and absences.

The curious case of So This Is Africa (Columbia, 1933) shows that both Hollywood's in-house censors and state and local censors took seriously cinematic violations of racial and sexual norms. This spoof of “jungle” films exploited audience interest in a cycle of fictional and nonfictional depictions of “primitive” life. These films claimed partial exemption from taboos against sexual and racial boundary-crossing, and usually showed unclothed “native” women. But So This Is Africa went further. However farcical, its suggestions of adultery, interracial sex, homosexuality, and even bestiality raised an unusually large storm among the censors. Cut by one-third, the film still outraged many and helped precipitate the industry's creation of the Production Code Administration, designed to police the screen more tightly.