‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You’: Hollywood stars and lesbian spectatorship in the 1930s

Boldly claiming to ‘tell the facts and name the names’, in July 1955 Confidential Magazine embarked on telling ‘the untold story of Marlene Dietrich’. The exposé reads, ‘Dietrich going for dolls’, and goes on to list among her many female lovers the ‘blonde Amazon’ Claire Waldoff, writer Mercedes d’Acosta (rumoured to be Greta Garbo’s lover as well), a notorious Parisian lesbian named Frede, and multi-millionaire Jo Carstairs, whom Confidential Magazine dubs a ‘mannish maiden’ and a ‘baritone babe’. ¹