John Wyndham; The Midwich Cuckoos.

[Toby Frost]

Funny you mention that, because I've heard it said that Ernest Presinger as Dr Praetorius may be a model for Prunesquallor. They certainly look quite similar.

On the other hand, such things were not usually tackled directly in fiction until fairly recently.

Yes, definitely, but my feeling is that without a definite statement from the author, it's impossible to be 100% sure. I think a modern reader would say that, for instance, Steerpike is almost certainly a psychopath, but I don't know what Mervyn Peake would say about that, and so I can't say that it's canonically right. This idea of how you infer things when the author doesn't make a statement is really interesting.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I understand your hesitance and share it. On the other hand, such things were not usually tackled directly in fiction until fairly recently. The mores of the times would not allow it, a book would be banned and the author disgraced if they were too explicit. (Which also goes for depictions of sex, though in some cases the publicity would have sold extra copies. Lookin' at you, D. H. Lawrence.)

It's easier in film. Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon isn't ever called gay, but Lorre's hair and clothing and the fussiness of his actions would suggest it to the audience of the time. I think you can say much the same for Dr. Praetorious in Bride of Frankenstein. I expect literature had similar coding, though I also think that's harder to decode for current audiences not steeped in the language of the time, even as close a time as the 1930s and '40s.

Very true. In film (back in The Maltese Falcon era) it wasn't even possible to more than suggest (obliquely) even that heterosexual couples were engaged in sex outside marriage. But Paul Heinreid lighting two cigarettes, one for him and one for Bette Davis, would have instantly been recognised as post-coital - especially coming after a fade which from memory I think it does. And with Joel Cairo I'm sure Effie's look and the calling card smelling of gardenia would have alerted the audience even before he appeared on screen. (BTW in the same film Wilmer (a sexually ambiguous name if there ever was one), the Fatman's young enforcer, is referred to as a 'gunsel'. A gunsel prior to Hammett slipping it past his publishers, meant "a young male kept as a sexual companion, especially by an older tramp," gunsel | Etymology, origin and meaning of gunsel by etymonline.

Sometimes the coded language wasn't even that coded!

And radio. Feldman and Took never actually said that ageing chorus boys Julian and Sandy were gay. But...