ABSTRACT
the artistic achievement of the Beatles has enriched postwar popular culture in innumerable ways, contributing among the finest melodies and most creative musical products of the popular music idiom as well as playing a major role in our figuring of male celebrity. The Beatles are indelibly burned onto the retina of Western postwar popular culture. Their two major films, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), display deeply queer sensibilities that have been largely overlooked, both critically and in public opinion; perhaps thanks to this blindness regarding content, the Beatles’ global popularity ensured that these queer touches were broadcast to untold millions of viewers. In the general discourse, the queerness residing in these two films, which plays a major role in the films’ subversive charm and surrealistic style, has hidden behind the cover of a “zany story” about “boys having a lark.” An examination of the overt queer moments and less obvious queer aspects of these films shows that queer has a strong place in the Beatles’ cinematic oeuvre. Embedded in their films and in their essential identity as four tightly knit men are signals and codes—some overt, some implied—introducing queerness into the cultural icon that is the Beatles, and perhaps reflecting back to the culture at large its own queer concerns.
