ABSTRACT
Movies with lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered (LGBT) characters have been produced in unprecedented numbers since the late 1980s. After decades of invisibility and/or connotative stereotyping (enforced by the Hollywood Production Code and the fi lm industry’s more far-reaching and long-lasting heterosexism), the last twenty years have seen the rise of a vigorous gay and lesbian independent cinema, including the so-called New Queer Cinema. Television has given us mainstreamed queers-nextdoor like “Ellen” (1994-1998) and “Will & Grace” (1998-2006), while quasiindependent Oscar-winning fi lms like Boys Don’t Cry (1999), The Hours (2002), Far From Heaven (2002), and Capote (2005) play to ever-widening audiences. Even recent mainstream Hollywood comedies fi rmly aimed at heterosexual consumers such as Talladega Nights (2006) and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) have included not-wholly derogatory gay subplots and characters. Importantly, this rise in the number of LGBT images has been accompanied by the development of queer theory, both a broad approach to restructuring the ways we think about human sexuality as well as a more
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focused critical method that allows us to make better sense of the cultural artifacts that represent and construct contemporary sexualities.
