The Lavender Legacy of MGM Musicals: How Hollywood’s Brightest Stars Lit the Way for Queer Audiences

By Richard Fleischman

Step behind the velvet curtain and discover the hidden world beneath the glittering surface of Hollywood’s golden age.

From The Wizard of Oz to Singin’ in the Rain, the lavish musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer defined an era of spectacle, song, and stardom. But for generations of queer viewers, these films offered far more than escapist fantasy—they offered coded messages, forbidden longings, and a lifeline to a world where self-expression could shimmer beneath the surface.

In The Lavender Legacy of MGM Musicals, acclaimed cultural historian Richard Fleischman unearths the queer subtext embedded in MGM’s most iconic productions. With insight, wit, and deep reverence for the genre, he explores how these Technicolor dreams became sites of resistance, identity, and community for LGBTQ+ audiences and artists alike.

Spanning the studio’s most beloved classics and the behind-the-scenes stories of stars, designers, choreographers, and composers—many of them queer—this book reveals how musicals became a sanctuary in an age of censorship. From Judy Garland’s rise as a queer icon to the gender play of Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly, from shimmering ballgowns to backstage numbers bursting with innuendo, The Lavender Legacy traces the music, the movement, and the meaning behind the MGM mythos.

Whether you’re a lifelong musical lover or discovering the genre anew, this book will change the way you watch—and feel—about the most dazzling dream machine Hollywood ever built.

Perfect for fans of classic cinema, queer history, and the power of performance to speak what society cannot.