“Classic Hollywood film posters are often looked at nostalgically as a form of escapism, but we want to give people a different way of looking at it,” said Ron Magliozzi, the co-curator of a unique new exhibition.

At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, What Price Hollywood features 140 old film posters, assembled to provide a different lens on the golden era onwards.

“We selected works to make points about gender, the fact that there are many gazes on this work whether you’re gay, queer, trans, a man or a woman. We wanted to represent the work in that context,” Magliozzi said. “This is a gendered take on the collection.”

The museum has a collection of about 12,000 posters, but many on view are on loan from the collection of Ira M Resnick, a historian and movie poster collector in New York.

“None of these films have any queer content, it’s just the queer gaze,” said co-curator Brittany Shaw. “It’s how you as a gay person relate to works when you want to see yourself in something when you’re not actually represented.”

It all began with the poster for What Price Hollywood?, the first version of A Star is Born, made in 1932. Its personifies traditional gender roles.

“I find myself in a heterosexual nightmare with some of these,” said Shaw. “It’s so repetitive, everyone’s a little trapped, in some way.”

Things get more interesting in the second room of the exhibition, where gender roles begin to blur – male actors played feminine characters and vice versa.

“Rudolph Valentino was the first victim of queer-baiting in the 1920s for playing a feminized man in films,” said Magliozzi. “He was bullied in the press by male journalists.”

Shaw and Magliozzi sifted through thousands of film posters and lobby cards, film stills displayed in theatre lobbies to entice moviegoers.

“That was so exciting,” said Shaw, “going through hundreds of lobby cards that feel subversive to us now and understanding how they were used as advertising at the time.”

They had a jaw dropping moment upon discovering a letter in Resnick’s collection written by exiled Hollywood actress Louise Brooks, who wrote in 1965 that no men wanted to watch Greta Garbo films, though “pansies, of course, are excluded from this generality!”

The letter details an unspoken truth of the industry at the time. “We were looking for voices to put in the show, not just critics but performers,” said Magliozzi. “It’s not about the nostalgia but the representation of gender and the way stars play with gender.”

Towards the end of the exhibit, a selection of 1930s lobby cards hang on a wall around a poster for the 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble.

“When you put them all together, you see a pattern,” said Magliozzi. “John Waters is a culmination of all the films here, challenging whole notion of gender. It’s a punctuation point of the show, it shows what happened much later after this film period.”

Another key image in the exhibit is a poster for The Scarlet Empress from 1934 starring Marlene Dietrich, directed by Josef von Sternberg. “He was one of the ‘enlightened directors’ along with Nicholas Ray and John Houston,” said Magliozzi. “These directors played with the gender, pushed their stars in different directions gender-wise.”

The poster shows Dietrich with Sam Gaffe, who is wearing a fur coat and a wig, slightly matching his costar. “She’s a little more male, he’s a little more female,” said Magliozzi.

It taps into a recurring theme in the show. “Things here speak to a camp aesthetic, and why the poster for Female Trouble is here, all these things swirl together and create a future language,” said Shaw.

Along with the poster exhibit, 20 films will screen, looking back at what the co-curators call “the nature of sexual politics on-screen”. From homoerotic narratives to gender-bending roles, visitors can see films including GW Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl starring Brooks in 1929 and Ganja & Hess, a blaxploitation horror film from 1973.

The curators point out homoeroticism on lobby cards, including one for a cowboy film that reads: “Their glasses were empty their guns were loaded.” “Western films are the most fetishized films, there’s more whipping, an entire catalogue of eroticism in its suggestion,” said Magliozzi.

There’s the poster for a Warner Bros film called I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, showing a topless man getting whipped by a group of men. “It’s a sadomasochistic scene, it’s a little kinky,” said Magliozzi. “There’s kinkiness in a lot of these images.”

Magliozzi stops in front of a lobby card for Sayonara in 1957 starring Marlon Brando, who is sitting on a bed, gazing at another man in the room.

“It looks like a seduction scene,” he says.

They hope viewers will look at these film posters beyond the male gaze that created them. “We wanted to show a younger audience, who are more liberated with their gender than Hollywood was, a way into the work that has new meaning,” said Magliozzi.

Long before the Harvey Weinstein claims and the #MeToo movement, there was bad behavior in the Hollywood film industry. “I think a lot of toxic things happened in Hollywood but there were liberated people,” said Shaw. “You can find queer and feminist moments, but none of it will be perfect.”

• What Price Hollywood is showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 15 June