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The politics of representation are probably as old as writing and drawing. We know there were Greeks who thought that playwright Euripides was giving a bad image of their culture-- after all, Medea is hardly a good role model for young mothers and wives, the first of a long line of "Desperate Housewives." It's no different today. Not only do mainstream critics-- like First Lady of Vice Lynn Chaney-- fret that rap and Girls Gone Wild are destroying the youth of America-- but people in minority communities, of all sorts, brood over their media reflection.

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I'm just finishing teaching "Contemporary Issues in GLBT Studies: Hate Crimes, Queer Marriage, and 'Will and Grace'" at Dartmouth College, and a sizeable portion of our class work has been discussing queer representation. In 2005 it's an odd discussion since these students-- who are between 18 and 22-- approach the topic with a limited historical knowledge. Sure, they know all about "Will and Grace," "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," and "The L Word"-- this is what they grew up on these past five years-- but anything before is foreign to them. Films like In and Out, Cruising, Tootsie, The Killing of Sister George, Reflections in a Golden Eye-- might as well have been made 100 years ago, not ten or 20.

On one hand, it's interesting to think that queer themes and images in films have expanded so much these past two decades that there's now a history needing uncovering. But what I found equally interesting is that the discussions we had in class were not that much different than discussions I had with people 30 years ago. While images and movies and TV shows may proliferate, the ability to discuss them has moved at a slower pace.

The class begins with a screening of The Celluloid Closet-- the 1995 film based on Vito Russo's 1981 groundbreaking book about gays in movies-- and a discussion of "what's a 'gay-positive' image?" Russo, and the film, argue hard that there are "positive images" (good gays-- happy, well adjusted homosexuals) and "negative images" (bad gays-- evil queens, bad dykes, people who commit suicide at the end), and that we need more "positive images." All this sort of made sense in 1981, when the movement was still struggling.

My plan is always to have the students watch The Celluloid Closet and agree with it-- i.e,. to understand that the discussion about "positive images" is a valid one-- and then spend the next 12 weeks having them watch all those films that have "negative images"-- Suddenly Last Summer, Cruising, The Children's Hour, Basic Instinct, Silence of the Lambs-- films that have been labeled, for various reasons, "negative images." Once they see how much fun these films are, and how complicated, I always hope that they'll come away with a more nunaced view of how to look at movies.

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Well, after ten weeks this works and it doesn't work. Of course students love many of these films-- Suddenly Last Summer, for instance, features homosexual cannibalism, procuring, class exploitation, and a hint of incest, and is always popular. So is Reflections in a Golden Eye, Scary Movie, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back-- all of which have come in for condemnation by gay anti-defamation groups such as GLAAD. My students watch these movies with a sophisticated eye and sense of humor. They can see that Reflections in a Golden Eye is about the complications of sex and life, and not just about deranged homosexual army officers. They can disagree about Scary Movie-- some seeing it as a parody of homophobia and some as simply a reinscription of tawdry homophobic cliches being recycled for a teen boy audience.

They can also understand how the basic concept of the "positive gay image"-- the happy, well adjusted homo-- is an outdated one. Certainly Jack, on "Will and Grace" is hardly anyone's idea of a well adjusted homo-- he's an egomaniacal, self-serving, mean-spirited monster-- but is fun and essentially harmless as well. The same is true of the American "Queer as Folk"-- these guys are hardly, by Celluloid Closet standards, positive: mostly vain, partying, often drug addled, and pretty one-dimensional, they are a TV consumer-culture vision of some weird, echt-American version of Gays Gone Wild.

But what struck me this time around teaching the class is how much the basic rule of popular culture-- that it is enjoyable, fun, and entertains people-- is the bottom-line rule here.

Pleasure in popular culture was never really factored into the analysis of The Celluloid Closet-- images were "positive" or "negative," and no one seemed to enjoy much of anything. In some, very real sense these "positive images" felt like a duty, not a pleasure. The students in the class want to like movies-- enjoy them as well as think about them. They actually have a more complicated relationship to movies and TV than I've ever seen before-- probably from sheer inundation. But they also simply don't feel the driving need for "positive images" that past generations of gay people did.

This was vividly brought out in class with a major discussion/argument toward the end of the term. Someone mentioned that she had just seen The Lion King again and that Scar-- the scheming, duplicitous uncle to the young lion cub, whose faggy voice is dubbed by Jeremy Irons-- was gay. Immediately the class erupted. They all loved The Lion King (a mystery to me, as it seems such a stupid, third-rate animated film), and the gay students adored the fact that they saw Scar as being gay (even if he were the bad gay-- he is the sort of bad guy you love to hate), and the heterosexual students rejected the "gay label" because they didn't want to hear that a film they loved might have been homophobic. The discussion of Scar's "gayness"-- and the film's representation of a gay lion as being a bad lion-- was the most animated we had for the entire term.

All of this proved to me that when you come down to it, social issues like gay marriage and hate-crimes, pale in importance when you put them next to the really vital issues of Scar being a big old lion evil queen, or whether or not the jokes of Scary Movie were pro-gay funny, or homophobic funny.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com