Judy Garland Reveals Why Nearly All of Her Husband’s Were Gay

Behind the Glamour: The Hidden Lives, Fierce Ambitions, and Unlikely Queer Icons of Hollywood

Judy Garland and Joan Crawford became two of Hollywood’s most unforgettable women, but their stories were shaped by far more than fame, romance, and red-carpet glamour.

Beneath the polished images were painful childhoods, difficult marriages, relentless ambition, scandal, and secrets that Hollywood had every reason to conceal.

Garland’s five marriages have long fascinated audiences, particularly because two of her husbands were widely reported to have had relationships with men.

Yet her connection to gay culture cannot be explained simply by the men she married.

Her vulnerability, outsider status, and lifelong struggle for acceptance helped make her an enduring symbol for generations of gay men.

Crawford’s story reveals a different kind of Hollywood survival.

She transformed herself from a struggling Texas girl into an international star by sheer determination, fighting studios, rivals, critics, and even her own insecurities.

But behind that triumph lay abuse, miscarriages, troubled marriages, adoption controversies, alcoholism, family conflict, and an increasingly desperate need to control how the world saw her.

Joan Crawford was born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, into a family struggling financially.

Her father abandoned the family when she was an infant, leaving her mother to raise the children.

Her mother’s later marriage to opera-house manager Henry J. Cassin exposed young Lucille to performers and artists, but the household also became a source of trauma.

The mistreatment she experienced during childhood would leave a lasting mark.

Seeking escape, Lucille eventually abandoned education and pursued dancing.

She joined chorus lines, traveled, and fought for opportunities in Hollywood.

MGM disliked her original surname and turned her renaming into a publicity stunt.

After the winning suggestion, Joan Arden, proved unavailable, the studio settled on Joan Crawford.

Crawford quickly learned that Hollywood did not simply hand success to ambitious women.

In one early film, she was effectively used as a body double for Norma Shearer.

She resented being treated as secondary and became determined to build her own career.

She promoted herself aggressively, entered dance contests, cultivated publicity, and relentlessly pursued attention.

Her breakthrough came with Our Dancing Daughters in 1928.

Crawford became a major star almost overnight.

Her private life was no less dramatic.

She married Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in 1929, entering a prestigious Hollywood family but finding herself treated as an outsider by his parents.

The marriage eventually deteriorated amid jealousy and infidelity.

Crawford’s affair with Clark Gable became part of Hollywood gossip, while Fairbanks pursued relationships of his own.

The marriage ended in 1933.

Crawford then married actor Franchot Tone in 1935.

She wanted him to become a major movie star, while he remained more committed to serious theater.

Their relationship deteriorated further after Crawford suffered multiple miscarriages.

Tone reportedly struggled with depression and alcohol and became physically abusive.

Crawford eventually left him in 1939.

Her career, meanwhile, suffered its own crisis.

In 1938, she was branded “box office poison,” suggesting that her salary had become unjustifiable.

Yet Crawford repeatedly demonstrated her greatest talent: refusing to accept defeat.

That determination produced one of her defining triumphs.

She fought for the lead role in Mildred Pierce despite director Michael Curtiz’s doubts about her.

The film became a major success, and in 1946 Crawford won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

She had expected to lose and stayed home from the ceremony, only to discover that she had triumphed.

She immediately transformed the unexpected victory into a publicity moment.

Motherhood brought Crawford both joy and profound pain.

She adopted children after suffering miscarriages, but her family life remained turbulent.

Her later connection to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society also became controversial after the organization was exposed for abusive and illegal adoption practices.

Crawford’s rivalries became legendary.

Her hostility toward Mercedes McCambridge reportedly had roots in Crawford’s relationship with McCambridge’s husband.

But her most famous feud was with Bette Davis.

Their rivalry intensified after they starred together in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Davis later suggested that their resentment was connected to Franchot Tone, whom both women had loved.

The rivalry reached an extraordinary moment at the 1963 Academy Awards.

Davis was nominated, while Crawford was not.

Crawford nevertheless arranged to accept awards on behalf of absent nominees.

When Anne Bancroft won Best Actress but could not attend, Crawford walked onto the stage and accepted the Oscar while Davis watched from the audience.

Later in life, Crawford became increasingly obsessed with control.

Her marriage to Pepsi executive Alfred Steele gave her influence within the company, and after his death she fought successfully for a position on its board.

She understood publicity almost instinctively, even arranging product placements and maintaining a carefully managed public image.

But the image eventually became exhausting.

Alcohol increasingly affected her professional life, while her obsession with cleanliness became extreme.

She covered possessions in plastic and reportedly kept alcohol close at hand.

After a serious fall in 1974, she stopped drinking.

Crawford gradually withdrew from public life, particularly after seeing photographs of herself that she disliked.

The woman who had spent decades controlling her appearance ultimately became frightened of being seen.

Her private life also contained rumors of relationships with women, leading some historians and biographers to suggest that she may have been bisexual.

Names such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe became part of the speculation surrounding her sexuality, although much of the evidence remains uncertain.

Crawford died in 1977 at the age of 73, leaving behind a legacy built as much on determination as on talent.

Garland’s story provides another perspective on Hollywood’s hidden world.

She married five times, and two husbands—Vincente Minnelli and Mark Herron—were widely reported to have had relationships with men.

Herron’s long-term relationship with actor Henry Brandon reportedly continued around his brief marriage to Garland.

In an era when homosexuality could destroy careers, marriages sometimes functioned as protective arrangements.

Such relationships became known as “lavender marriages,” allowing celebrities to preserve socially acceptable public identities while concealing private lives.

Yet Garland’s importance to gay culture reaches far beyond the marriages themselves.

One explanation comes from José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification.

A person from a marginalized community can take a mainstream cultural figure and reinterpret that figure through personal experience.

Garland’s struggles—her insecurity, vulnerability, rejection, and constant fight for acceptance—could therefore become a mirror for gay men who felt excluded from mainstream society.

David Halperin offered a more complicated perspective.

He argued that gay culture and gay subculture were not necessarily the same thing.

Mainstream gay culture could reproduce conventional ideas of respectability, while subcultures could provide greater space for drag performers, women, transgender people, queer people of color, and others outside those boundaries.

Garland occupied a fascinating position within this landscape.

She was not necessarily embraced because she represented homosexuality.

Instead, she represented emotional survival, difference, theatricality, vulnerability, and defiance.

Her pain could be transformed into something empowering by people who recognized similar feelings in their own lives.

That may explain why Garland endured as a gay icon long after many of her contemporaries faded.

Her appeal was not simply about hidden husbands or Hollywood gossip.

It was about recognition.

Crawford and Garland ultimately represented two different forms of survival.

Crawford fought the world through control, ambition, reinvention, and relentless self-promotion.

Garland became powerful in another way: by embodying vulnerability and turning personal suffering into an emotional language that outsiders could claim as their own.

Hollywood tried to manufacture perfect stars.

Instead, its most enduring icons were often women whose imperfections made them impossible to forget.