So, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn Had Gay Love Affairs. And?

What’s most remarkable about the tales told by Scotty Bowers, the subject of the documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, is that so few people are talking about them. Both in the film and in his 2012 autobiography, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, Bowers claims he was an illicit, often same-sex matchmaker for Hollywood’s elite.

It all started with actor Walter Pidgeon, who picked Bowers up when he was working at a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard in 1946, not long after returning from the Pacific theater. Pidgeon gave Bowers $20 for their time together. Word about him spread, and soon he was using the gas station to supply men and women to celebrity clients of both genders—until the 1980s, when he retired because of the AIDS crisis.