ABSTRACT
The development of media technologies, twinned with an increasingly connected world of remote access and mobile media, has changed the landscape in which queer representations are produced, disseminated and consumed. This chapter focuses on the history of gay male representation in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to highlight some of the challenges and opportunities that such representations – and those who produce and consume them – face and continue to face. In spite of censorship, legal constraints and social proscription, thinly veiled representations of gay effeminacy pervaded twentieth-century British media culture. The chapter explores how the advent of digital platforms and digital methods of self-representation have changed understandings of gay male representation and also considers their power dynamics. Other traces of homosexuality can be found in British cinema, which is littered with characters who, while never being identified as 'gay', play to particular stereotypes that allow audiences to 'read' the character as queer.
