This book explores the representation of the heterosexual female with the homosexual, bisexual or queer male, within contemporary film and television forms, using the term straight girls and queer guys. While this coupling is often employed to characterise the female as a ‘Fag Hag’, framing a reductive terminology that clearly debases the straight girl and the queer guy, and there is a sense of mutual use, evident in the relationship appearing as a kind of masquerade or disguise for a ‘regular’ heterosexual coupling, I argue that the straight girl and queer guy archetype is an advancing and prolific form.

Through examining this archetype within films and television programmes mostly produced in the United Kingdom and North America, or at least addressing Anglocentric audiences evident in my case study on the Brazilian film The Way He Looks, this book foregrounds the notion of the hetero media gaze. Critiquing the foundational work of Laura Mulvey (1975) with regards to the cinematic gaze, and extending the work of later writers such as Jackie Stacey (1987) with regard to the homosocial female gaze, and Richard Dyer ([1989] 2000) in relation to the commodification of the queer male body, this book develops a conceptual framework that contextualises film theory with television studies and performance studies. Key aspects include: questioning the fixity of the dominant gaze as gendered, or socially exclusive; examining the significance of the queer gaze in relation to consumption; considering the importance of spectatorship, and the relationship to celebrity; exploring the significance of the televisual glance in relation to domesticity; considering documentary and issues of performativity; and examining the significance of youth and the context of social realism. These are explored by considering key case studies, which, while they are not examined in terms of chronological progression, offer a discussion, generally within the time frame of between 1948 and 2015, in terms of media production.

This includes examining prototypical representations of the queer gaze within the films Rope and Suddenly Last Summer, and the queering of male and female coupling in the performance of Kenneth Williams in the Carry On films.