The celebs and stars who made entertainment back then may, at least a lot of them, have been dirty. But the entertainment itself was still somewhat healthy, and there was no obvious attempt to chance the whole culture into something where they could have operated openly. They still had to hide what they were.

Whether that makes those earlier eras better than our recent history, I don't know. You could say that with all that dirt being dragged into the open now we have a chance to purge at least most of it from our world. But then, they managed to sour the culture as a whole a lot by now. If something like hunting children could have beeb proven back then the hunters might have ended up dead before they even got to court, by vigilante mobs. Now... well, we'll see.