ABSTRACT
Gay people are treated as "normal" rather than psychologically disturbed and psychopathic, they are less likely to be made the subject of efforts to "cure" them or "save" them. This is all well and good, and perhaps gay people need to be normalized in this way as part of a struggle to be humanized and treated as deserving of basic human and civil rights. The gay male market niche has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s, and one might think that because these films are generally made by gay directors and producers, and targeted to gay young men, that they would provide counter hegemonic images and performances of masculinity. To the extent that gay-identified men have internalized the values of hegemonic masculinity, they too tend to envision romantic relationships between "straight-acting" and "gay-acting" men; as in the heterosexual world, though, these relationships are understood to be undermined by tensions and conflicts.
