Oh yes. Hollywood was full of them.
A very interesting perspective is given in the movie “Advise and Consent” in which a single incident of perversion in a politician’s dim past comes back to haunt him as he is being considered for a presidential appointment.
It is a very compelling drama, and does not sugar coat the sleazy underworld of homosexuality.
I’m surprised they were even allowed to make that movie.
Jack Paar wrote about it half a century ago (ignore the idiotializing by the blogger)
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2010/05/the-homophobia-of-jack-paar.html
...While reading Jack Paar’s second book, My Saber is Bent (1961, Pocket Books), my mouth froze during chapter fourteen. I assumed the page heading, Fairies and Communists, was a tongue-in-cheek title that one needn’t take seriously. This is, after all, a book written by a top television comedian. Instead, what it fed me was hitherto overlooked information about Jack Paar. Granted, this was the early sixties; an era when social mores allowed sexism, racism and homophobia to exist more or less unabated. That being said, there were several people that rejected such offensive conventions and the arts were often far more accepting. This is what makes the stance of Paar, by most accounts an erudite man, all the more difficult.
Paar was known for his many feuds. He sparred with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, actor Mickey Rooney and fellow TV host Ed Sullivan. But perhaps Paar’s greatest feud was one that has been completely ignored - his vocal hatred of and decade-long fight with - the homosexual community. In the pages of My Saber is Bent, Paar writes without apology about his disdain for gays in show business. He obviously worked very hard to cull a series of quotes from other respected pop culture figures that at some point made a disparaging remark about gays. Ernie Kovacs, Oscar Levant, George Jean Nathan and Alex King are all dragged into Paar’s essay to further his cause. This is the bizarre chapter, Fairies and Communists, reproduced in its entirety. It is followed by a brief story on a confrontation that transpired between Jack and the gay community a few years later.
Fairies and Communists by Jack Paar...