Scotty Bowers and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017) is an independent queer history documentary focusing on the life of Scotty Bowers. The full-length documentary focuses on the past and final years of Bowers, a World War II Marine who became a sex worker and fixer for the closeted queer actors, directors, musicians, and the elite during the postwar years, helping out the stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The film is based both on the memoir Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, as well as interviews with Bowers before his passing. In film strips and photos from the 1940s and 50s, Bowers is often seen with brown hair pomaded into place and either in his gas station service uniform or in dapper suits at glittering parties. In interviews and footage from his final years, Bowers is most often seen with his hair gray and curly, wearing a blue linen shirt, jeans, and sneakers as he bops around Los Angeles in his mid-nineties.
Throughout the documentary, we get a sense of Bowers’s larger-than-life personality – happy, warm, sharp as a tack, business-minded, generous, and with an incredible memory. Bowers not only created warm and returning business and personal relationships with many of his glitterati clients, but he is also responsible for making incredible connections that furthered the study of human sexuality in American academia (providing his data to Kinsey as well as connecting him with other interviewees during the Kinsey Project, etc). He speaks openly about his attractions and sexual adventures, or “tricks,” with many of his male and female clients and friends during his glory days. Bowers also speaks lovingly about his first wife (whom he loved but they ran separate lives from each other most of the time and understood this about each other) as well as his second, later-in-life wife. Though his attractions ran across the gender spectrum, he does not use the term “bisexual” to describe his orientation.
That said, Bowers is a staunch advocate for telling his story and openly discussing how the Hays Code forced many in Los Angeles and the film industry to stay in the closet to avoid bad publicity and how his work helped them reclaim their lives. All but two of the dozens of people whom Bowers serviced (if they were living at the time of the book or the film), as well as the descendants of the celebrity names mentioned, have confirmed that Bowers is telling the truth.
The documentary deals in a good deal of Golden Age gossip but also humanizes Bowers, speaking at length about the horrors of war he witnessed during his time in service, the pros and cons of his business and his faults, as well as getting a full sketch of his character in the days of filming shortly before his death. Scotty Bowers does make hay of the illicit goings-on of his youth but also takes pains to neither lionize him nor put him in judgment, either for his character or for what he has done with his career and personal life.
In the end, Scotty Bowers gives an ultra-rare look into a highly protected world of yore and works on taking off the sanitized pedestal the men and women of Hollywood’s Golden Age, while fully fleshing out the man who helped them live out their sexual lives discreetly and with honor. It is a great example of male bisexuality in modern documentaries.