I had a similar email discussion the other day with someone along these lines. We had been discussing old movies and he was writing about his love of the old Laurel and Hardy movies. He wrote to me that there was a documentary called The Celluloid Closet, about homosexuality as depicted over the years in cinema. He said that L&H were underground heroes of the gay community. He pointed out one scene where Stan’s wife was annoyed with him (what’s new, right?), and he says to Ollie “She thinks I love you more than I love her.” And Ollie responds with something like, “Let’s not discuss that.” Now, Ollie’s response could just simply have been more in the nature of Let’s just not go that direction, but others saw it differently, I guess.
Anyway, my response to my friends was very much like yours: Only a deviant would look at the great Laurel and Hardy and see a gay couple.
In the past 20 years or so, there have been slews of books by homo authors who read “gay subtexts” into EVERY imagineable old movie. Even things like the Universal monster movies, where the Frankenstein monster is supposed to be some kind of symbol of being a homosexual outcast! The insanity is endless. They have it encompassing everything.
And I even see it every time I venture over to the Internet Movie Database, where submitted old-movie reviews by dingbats will invariably refer to any character played by unglamourous or semi-homely character actresses like Aline MacMahon, Agnes Moorehead and such, as automatically indicative of a “lesbian subtext.” It’s just mind-bogglingly insane. I think this craziness is being circulated throughout academic/college circles, like a lot of other weird liberal-tinged historical revisionism, and young minds are buying it all up, and perpetuating it further, in their internet postings.