Predatory Lesbians and Killer Queens: What's Gay About All About Eve

As Pride Month 2026 winds down, I am considering one of classic cinema’s masterpieces through a gay lens.

Since I first saw it in the late '80s, the 1950 black-and-white show-business saga All About Eve has been one of my favorite films. 

It took me until recently to realize that it is full of gay references and subtext. All About Eve is shot through with melodrama, biting wit, over-the-top performances, and sly, Sapphic winks and gay intimations from the Hays Code era. All of this may not exactly evoke Pride, but it serves as a historical window.

Anne Baxter as Eve

Take the cunning character of Eve, who first appears in a drab trench coat and bucket hat outside the stage door, where diva Margo Channing is performing on Broadway. Eve’s hair is a practical, butch cut. Her attire, her cold, calculating, homewrecking behavior, and, at the end of the film, her ensnaring of another young actress who will apparently take over where Eve left off in exchange for favors all scream “lesbian.” Moreover, in keeping with the era’s stereotypes, Eve is portrayed as a predatory lesbian.

Bette Davis as Margo Channing

Then there is Margo herself, a diva for the ages, who prances and preens. Played by the foundational gay icon Bette Davis, she delivers one of the cinema’s campiest lines, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” In one of the film’s climactic scenes, she tells her confidante Karen that life isn’t worth a damn without a man to come home to. This shout-out to traditional, heteronormative mores serves as a counterpoint to Eve’s man-hating scheming.

George Sanders as Addison DeWitt

Finally, there is my favorite character, the acerbic, viper-tongued, cigarette-holder-wielding drama critic Addison DeWitt. I have tried to model my icy demeanor on his composure and sharp tongue to put down anyone who trifled with me. He is the ultimate killer queen.

DeWitt’s beard at Margo’s fateful drunken orgy is the aspiring starlet and dimwit Miss Caswell, portrayed by none other than Marilyn Monroe. When she speaks, he tells her, “You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.”

"Killer to Killer":
DeWitt confronts Eve

During the film’s denouement, set at the Taft Hotel in New Haven, DeWitt calls Eve’s bluff. Eve’s hard-luck background is a total fabrication, and she has her lesbian eyes on the married playwright, Lloyd Richards.

Preparing to blackmail Eve, DeWitt tells her, "It's important right now that we talk, killer to killer." After the deed is done, he declares, "You completely belong to me.” 

“That I should want you at all,” he goes on, “suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. But that, in itself, is probably the reason. You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also, our contempt for humanity and inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other.”

All of this self-loathing, camp, and melodrama emerge from the midcentury closet to make a film that is enjoyable on its own terms as a show-business parable, yet, as we regard it today, a cornerstone of queer cinema.

Happy Heteros:
This publicity still hangs
in my downstairs hallway

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