SSC Film Studies

The article 'Gays in film' was created by Richard Dyer. The article comments on films and how the media is "a carrier, reinforcer or shaper of our oppression". It states that as an audience we've tended to want gay characters to be represented according to certain ideologies. This article looks at how this is applied in films and how the gay characters/themes are from a heterosexual ideology and their hegemony.

"Gayness should express itself on film". Films have gay sensibility, meaning they're working with tradition and a set of conventions, so they're difficult to change and therefore showing homosexuality in film is difficult to get across without a negative response. The article then comes to mention a film called The Detective, staring Frank Sinatra. Frank's character is a liberal defender of gays, and through his character shows forms of self oppression. The dominant image of the gays cannot be reduced as the films conventions are very powerful and they are conveyed through the script and the star.

"Gays as ordinary human beings".

• films should show that gays are ordinary people
• two women in bed together is not the same as a man and a woman together or two men. It is different emotionally because it involves two people who have received broadly the same socialisation (being both the same gender) and have this has formed their personalities in relation to the same pressures and experiences. It is socially different because it is oppressed.
• condemned even for having gay desires- this is shown through films such as,