Figuren des schwulen Kinos

Spectacle of irresponsible pleasure – as exciting as it is threatening: D. A. Miller's essays demonstrate how the construction and maintenance of heterosexual identity are inextricably linked to figures of the homosexual. Gay cinema shines a light on a world that has largely remained cinematically invisible to this day. Films like William Friedkin's Cruising associate the portrayal of the homosexual with crime, linking gay desire with violence and visualizing the paranoid fear of the ordinary man that contact with the homosexual will make him homosexual himself. To this day, cinema grapples with such fears. Successful films like Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain or Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name do little to alleviate this. Celebrated for their subversive honesty and transformed into masterpieces of intense sensuality, gay mainstream films ultimately devolve into comfort films despite their apparent roughness and sincerity. These films are certainly beautiful, as the enthusiastic reviews noted, but beneath the masterful surface of the images, they are completely tamed by a sickly-sweet, seemingly liberal gaze that only approves of the homosexual object on the condition that it is neither truly shown nor looked at. Those who take up D. A. Miller's essays will encounter a different perspective on gay cinema, a critique of the representation of homosexuality in film that is as penetrating as it is subtle.