Banned on Broadway but coming to a theater near you: the captive and rethinking the breadth of American anti-lesbian hostility in the 1920s and '30s.

While the 1927 Broadway closing of the lesbian-themed play The Captive has been treated as launching the homophobic culture that dominated mid-twentieth-century America, the show actually continued to play in cities around the country. It was regularly greeted by packed houses and critics who scoffed at the reaction in New York. The opposition that did emerge was often generated by publisher William Randolph Hearst, while leading civil libertarians fought against him. This demonstrates that the homophobic policies of the 1920s and '30s were not the product of a deeply homophobic society, but generated by smaller numbers of moralizing entreprenuers.