A rare moment of lesbian visibility in 1930s Hollywood cinema, perhaps made possible by director George Cukor’s own sexual orientation, nonetheless shrouded in homophobia and made the butt of a joke, but worth registering here for its rarity and for the potential it offers to think that it might nonetheless have brightened a lesbian viewer’s day when it first came out in 1932. We once thanked heaven for small and not always benevolent mercies.

José Arroyo