The Images of Homosexuality

Just think of the line-up--the dam dyke and the camp queen, the lesbian vampire and the sadistic queer, the vulturine schoolmistress and the neurotic faggot, and all the rest. The amount of hatred, fear, ridicule and turn one's stomach packed into those images is unmistakable.

But the question of stereotyping cannot be left at that. Thinking about images of homoity needs to go beyond simply dismissing stereo sheaths as wrong and distorted. Righteous dismissal does not make the stereo instances go away, and tends to prevent us from understanding just what stereotypes are, how they function, ideologically and aesthetically, and why they are so resilient in the face of enlightened rejection.

How does club get an understanding of its unlike sexuality groups, in fiction as in heart? Society gets its information partly from what other people range them, and in carry, from narrators and from the thoughts of the characters, but to the highest degree knowledge about homosexuals is found on the evidence in front of them: what they do, how they do it, what they show and how they say it, and how they dress and where the live, and so on. This is where the information comes from, but how does lodge make sense of it? Sociological theory suggests four different, though inter-related, ways of organizing this information: role, individual, type and member (Peck 28).

When a soul is regarded in their role, they are thought of purely in foothold of the particular set of

When discussing modes of film picture show it is useful to speak in these sociologic terms. A type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily-grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and change or development is kept to a minimum. Types are instances which indicate those who live by the rules of society and those whom the rules of society are designed to exclude--the stereotype. For this reason, stereotypes are more austere than any other type. Where one may chose, and this applies even to a fictional character, a societal type, one is condemned to a stereotype. Moreover, the dramatic, loaded or horrific quality of stereotypes limit a individualality even further.

It is not surprising then that the genres in which homosexuals most often appear are horror films and comedies (Olson 24-27).

Atwell, Lee. "Homosexual Themes in the Cinema." Tangents March 1966: 4-10.

actions, including dress, speech, and gesture, that they are performing when first encountered. If a person encounters a brick-layer or housewife, their social role is already define in a cultural context. When a person has been defined in their role through this cultural context in that respect develops a sum totality called an individual. Or a person is seen according to a logic that assumes a certain charitable of person performs a certain kind of role, hence is a type. Both individual and type relate the information that has been coded into roles to a notion of personality. Then in context of role, individual and type their is the relationship between these three elements as in a member of a given class or social group (Peck 29-30). Clearly, the creators of cinema play upon these four elements to further the homosexual stereotype, and this gives a scientific reference point to understand gender stereotyping.

Stereotypes are also established through actual characterization of the individual. In cinema, character construction in terms of laissez faire draws upon seve
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