ABSTRACT
Although gay images have proliferated in contemporary Hollywood cinema in films such as In and Out (1997), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), and The Object of My Affection (1998), the gay characters in these films are made to signify in very limited and easily assimilable ways. The primary missing element in these and most other mainstream representations of gay men is, of course, sex. This is certainly nothing new, but it does seem to exemplify Leo Bersani’s claim in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” that dominant homophobia (at least in terms of gay men) is based on anxieties surrounding sex between men, particularly anal sex. According to Bersani, anal sex and its ties to the “suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” continues to be an uncontainable threat to straight masculinity and male subjectivity (1988, 212). Although Bersani has indeed moved to a more expansive view of the gay threat in recent work (Homos), given the persistence of phobias surrounding gay sex, it seems necessary to analyze just how pertinent his earlier claims about anal sex are to dominant cinema’s representational strategies. Granted, homophobia in cinema can never directly reflect the intricacies of the operations of homophobia in our broader society, but the intensity of the gay sex phobia in Hollywood speaks to (but doesn’t limit homophobia to) the overdetermined significance of gay sex in dominant society.
