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Regards,

Adrian

What I was trying was to move away from a very restrictive version of what “gay cinema” is, even in the minds of gay audiences. For the book I interviewed lots of people about what they understood gay cinema was, and most respondents had very clear ideas and lists of “do” and “don´t”. When I gave them examples of films which other people considered “gay cinema” (i.e., Mary Poppins, Picnic, Splendour in the Grass, The Sound of Music or even Can´t Stop the Music) they were almost upset as if I was making connections up. One of my concerns was to see if those films had any potentialities in common. I think I sketched some of those in the book, but what is important to me is to introduce the idea of experience in gay spectatorship. Experience, in the way discussed in the book is BOTH personal (i.e., “things that happen to you”), and shared (what those things may mean symbolically in our society). In other words I understand that for many people there is nothing gay in those films, they would not be caught dead in a ROcky Horror Picture Show screening, and that it is wrong to mix things.

But still, one thing we cannot escape is those films really mean a lot to some people because they go deeply into basic structures we associate with being gay. For me that happened a lot with Disney films. Some people grow out of Disney, I feel I was able to enjoy them as a child and then allowed them to say something about growing up different (as in Dumbo).

Films can be toolkits, places from where we can borrow ideas, reconstruct our senses of ourselves…

Best

It’s an interesting point you raise, Agueda, and one that we should look into in future for sure, since all this is very much related to what feminists (in your case) and queer theorists like to discuss on a daily basis!

I recently co-authored a paper on Women and ICT (which you can find here) where we discussed reasons why women did not go into ICT careers. We found (and there is more literature on the subject) that role models and stereotypes were still a strong influence on women’s decisions against ICT careers. As my colleague Alexa Joyce writes: although many girls are interested and competent in ICT, they are often wrongly dissuaded by teachers or parents who see ICT as a “man’s world”.

Reading your article, I was wondering if the same could be applied to gay men and not only are gay men steering more towards art careers because they are looking to be more “creative”, but because they are often wrongly dissuaded by teachers or parents who see ICT as a “straight man’s world”.

Oh, and note aside, I think creativity is something also very much present in sciences, contrary to the general belief.