In 1973, a sweet-tempered, ferociously imaginative ten-year-old boy named Patrick Horrigan saw the TV premiere of the film version of Hello, Dolly! starring Barbra Streisand. His life would never be the same. Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies traces Patrick's development from childhood to gay male adulthood as a series of encounters, sometimes mournful, sometimes hysterically funny, with an unexpected handful of Hollywood movies from the 1960s and 1970s.

Describing his favorite movies as if they told the story of his own life, Patrick Horrigan turns popular culture upside down and inside out. He tunnels back into the long, lazy afternoons of his conservative Catholic upbringing in suburban Pennsylvania where the movies offered salvation from boredom and self-loathing; he re-creates in loving, unembarrassed detail his turbulent relationship with his mother, the first and most important in a series of strong women, both real and cinematic, who goaded him toward self-awareness; and he dramatizes his adolescent escape, both in fact and in celluloid fantasy, to the greatest, gayest city on earth, the Emerald City of daydreams, New York.