All About Eve is beloved among gay audiences for its campy wit and its depiction of gendered competition in the theater. In spite of its appeal to the LGBTQ community, however, some critics and scholars have noted the film's ambivalent and coded depiction of homosexuality. While it is impossible to say whether the film takes an explicitly homophobic stance or whether it is at all concerned with homosexuality, All About Eve serves as an example of a film that looks curiously at gender and sexuality in 1950, a year when the Hays Code reigned supreme in Hollywood, and a fear of communism and homosexuality pervaded. Under the Hays Code, homosexuality could never be explicitly addressed in a film, but that didn't prevent filmmakers from making oblique allusions to it. Additionally, something known as "The Lavender Scare" was taking place in America at the time of All About Eve's release, and was characterized by the viewpoint that the homosexual lifestyle was connected to a sympathy with Communism. During the Cold War, homosexuals and their susceptibility to communist leanings were the subject of this particularly pointed scrutiny. Some scholars believe that All About Eve plays into this belief.
It is actually quite a common theory that Eve Harrington is meant to be coded as a lesbian, obsessed with Margo Channing to the point of idolatry, unsuccessful in heterosexual seduction, and bent on having a career in favor of a family. Theorists point out that an inaccurately bigoted representation of lesbianism as predatory and opportunistic was not uncommon in the mid 20th century. In a book called American Cold War Culture, Douglas Field elaborates on this theory by defining what makes Eve unique among film lesbians of the era. He writes, "Eve’s villainy differs from that of other lesbians of the Code era in one crucial respect. She has an ability to impersonate normative femininity that they do not, and thus she resembles the lesbian of the discourses of national security.” Many critics point to various quotes in the film that seem to suggest Eve's same-sex preferences, such as the moment when Margo is going to bed during Bill's party, and mockingly asks Eve if she would like to tuck her in. Eve responds, "If you'd like," to which Margo snarls, "I wouldn't like." Furthermore, these critics posit that Addison DeWitt is a homosexual as well, and that the "improbable" quality that he believes he and Eve share is queerness.
In his book on the depiction of lesbianism in films during the Cold War, Robert J. Corber writes, "Eve's queerness, which consists of a combination of femininity and lesbianism that unsettles homophobic stereotypes, indirectly ratified the model of womanhood that became dominant in the Cold War era. Mankiewicz, who wrote as well as directed All About Eve, claimed that he conceived of Eve as a lesbian and coached Baxter to play her as such." Corber is interested in disrupting the notion that All About Eve is an explicitly homophobic film. While the film seems to suggest that heterosexual family life is more rewarding than the ruthless ambition of Addison and Eve, it also, to Corber's mind, complicates the filmic depiction of lesbianism. He goes on to write, "The Cold War construction of the lesbian, in privileging the femme over the butch, inadvertently highlighted the mobility of sex, gender, and sexuality in relation to each other."
