Richard Dyer ([1980] 2001a) tells us that

Focusing on the context of film stars, Dyer relates the possible influence that actors may have in taking on different roles, relating the perception of those roles by the audience. At the same time, he suggests that such perception might also relate to the personal identity of the star, in some way offering diverse identification potential to audiences. For example Dyer (1986) relates the significance of the Hollywood actor Judy Garland ‘as having a special relationship to suffering, ordinariness, normality, and it is this relationship that structures much of the gay reading of Garland’ (143). Hence, while Judy Garland as an icon of Hollywood cinema might not have explicitly taken on roles that exhibited a close relationship to gay men in terms of character representation, at the same time gay audiences related to her with a sense of close identification that might be considered as a union in the manner of the straight girl and the queer guy. This chapter consequently considers the significance of explicit roles such as representations of straight girls with queer guys. Also it relates the context of the star persona, or the life world of the star, developing the discussion in Chapter 1, which focused on Doris Day and Rock Hudson, to this process.

As part of this, the context of the spectator will be explored, framing the opportunity of gay subjectivity in reading the union between the straight girl and the queer guy. To explore this I will examine the representation of Kenneth Williams within a range of Carry On films, arguing that his imagined real-life friendship with female characters such as Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims and Barbara Windsor influences how we might read these films, contextualising aspects of camp representation and fantasy identification, which foreground irony and parody. I then explore the films Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger 1971, UK) and Cabaret (Bob Fosse 1972, US), which offered the first explicit representations of the straight girl and the queer guy, contextualising the influence of the director John Schlesinger and the author Christopher Isherwood, respectively.