Of course, writers and filmmakers would find ways to include subtext in their work, but the damaging legacy of this Code cannot be overstated. Even beyond film scholarship, it doesn’t take much to see how the banning of any display of nonheterosexual love or attraction had a ripple effect that persists to this day, when we still have headlines that praise film studios for “introducing their first gay character.”5 Consider why we are still having debates about whether it’s okay for a female character to show sexual agency onscreen, whether it sets a bad example, whether talk of lubrication is
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