ABSTRACT
This essay is the story of a gay man’s obsession with gigolos, in particular with those men Hollywood paid to drop their pants during the 1980s. The Collins English Dictionary defines ‘gigolo’ as ‘a man who is kept by a woman, especially an older woman; a man who is paid to dance with or escort women’. I take it for granted that the men who signed the cheques for Richard Gere’s exhibitionism in American Gigolo (1980) and Tom Cruise’s posturing in Top Gun (1986) would insist that the stars’ bodies were put on display for the sole purpose of pleasuring women. But as Yvonne Tasker recently pointed out, ‘the meaning of the body on the screen is not secure, but shifting, inscribed with meaning in different ways at different points.’2 And as I intend to show, both films relied heavily on a tradition of homoerotic textual codes which, though hardly securing the male body as the exclusive object of homosexual desire, certainly invited gay men as well as heterosexual women to grab their share of visual pleasure.
