Here's a brief compendium of four camp numbers from movies and television, with Jimmy Cagney, Gene Autry, Glen Campbell, and Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin.
It's more camp than gay, at least by the modern definitions of the terms. All of them were clearly intended to be funny. So what point where the people trying to make?
Having looked recently at THE CELLULOID CLOSET, I would opine that this fits squarely into the period when homosexuals were purely seen as figures of fun, and performers had no particular issues in portraying them as such. I doubt that was the point. I think the implication is that if Jimmy Cagney and Tyrone Power Jr. Did this, then the most masculine of men were homosexuals.
