The 1941 Disney animated short THE RELUCTANT DRAGON features a gay (technically queer-coded) dragon who is a reclusive pacifist living in the mountains, avoiding conflict by spending his time conducting songbirds and writing poetry.

Gay star Clifton Webb plays the queer-coded villain Waldo Lydecker in the 1944 film-noir classic LAURA.

Clifton Webb is the queer-coded wealthy “bachelor” Elliott Templeton in Edmund Goulding’s 1946 adaptation of queer author W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel “The Razor’s Edge.”