Here’s an edgy plot: two gay hitmen, lovers, work for an urban mobster, carrying out his orders to murder and intimidate. As the law begins to turn the screws on the Mafioso, he turns on his henchmen and, in a double-cross, blows them up with a bomb. One survives and, in the grip of grief over his lover’s death, helps the police convict his boss. This isn’t a new episode of Law and Order, or even the latest hit from Sundance. It’s The Big Combo, a small-scale, extraordinarily violent 1955 crime shocker. Sure, the main story here is the obsessed cop’s pursuit of the crime boss, but the gay lovers — portrayed by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman — aren’t just integral to the story, they’re the most emotionally startling aspect of the film.

Although The Big Combo occupies only a page in Richard Barrios’s excellent new exploration of the representation of homosexuality in Hollywood films, it’s emblematic not only of the author’s exhaustive research but of a new, refreshing analysis of queer film. Barrios insists we view The Big Combo — and hundreds of other movies, both obscure and well known — not only as products of their (homophobic) times but as windows through which we can understand US culture.

This is a radical approach when you set it next to that of Vito Russo’s 1982 The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, which until now has been the seminal work on Hollywood queerness. Russo loved movies, but he was also a product of his time, and he was concerned about promoting " positive " mainstream images of homosexuality to the viewing public. The result was that The Celluloid Closet became a catalogue of " bad " images — queer villains, pathetic suicides, self-hating queens, mean, mannish dykes. Russo was an astute movie watcher, but time and again he misses the complexity of a film because he’s worrying about whether it’s " good for the gays. " Unfortunately, his book has, for two decades, defined much popular discourse on queer representation in cinema.

Barrios is generous in his assessment of Russo as a pioneer, but as Screened Out unfolds, it becomes clear that he has a quite different agenda. Not only has he uncovered a joyful plethora of long-forgotten films with queer plots — what’s the last time you read detailed analysis of the explicit lesbianism in the 1957 B-horror flick Voodoo Island, or of the pedophilic overtones in 1953’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, a surrealist musical fantasy written by Dr. Seuss in which Hans Conried is a mad-music teacher who kidnaps 500 little boys and makes them play his demonic and very large piano? — but he presents us with readings that are both subtle and original. When discussing the great sissy and pansy performers of 1930s comedies — Franklin Pangborn, Tyrell Davis, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton — he is not embarrassed by their effeminacy but rather celebrates their subversive wit and their flaunting of repressive gender norms. Taking a second look at Val Lewton’s 1943 The Seventh Victim, a sly, disturbing shocker about Satanism in Greenwich Village, he sees it not, as many gay critics have claimed, as a homophobic equation of lesbianism with devil worship but rather as a nuanced look at the dangers of repression.

Barrios’s voice here is colloquial and breathless — he can’t wait to tell us about some fabulous new detail he’s uncovered. But beneath the patina of gaiety lurks an tremendous amount of vital, original investigation. Ransacking studio archives and popular movie and fan magazines as well as movie-star memoirs and critical works, he’s pieced together the most complete history yet of queer film history and lore. No one has written so extensively about the gay subtext of the Topper films or the problems director Hal Roach faced in making the original 1940 gender-switch comedy Turnabout. (Barrios also gives a thumbnail sketch of the now-forgotten but probably homosexual American fantasist Thorne Smith, who wrote both Topper and Turnabout as well as other very queer novels.)

Barrios’s work here is invaluable, and more necessary than ever before. We may have Will and Grace on television and performers of the stature of Meryl Streep, Ed Harris, and Allison Janney being praised for their performances of lesbian and gay characters in The Hours, but it’s easy to forget that these characters did not arise out of a vacuum — or even a tradition that began in the 1980s. By giving this history of queer images in mainstream American culture, Barrios has illuminated the present as well as the past.