The Straight Male Gaze on Pretty Male Gays
How does it feel when straight men want to fuck us?
A quick little intro — I went ham on this one. I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and it just gave me a lot of feelings.
Warnings throughout this piece for discussion of the film’s gore and violence, the homophobia both in- and out- of universe, sexual violence, homophobia in general. I use a lot of slurs in this one because I self-identify with a lot of them, and a lot of this piece is about the ways in which queer identity is weaponised and not weaponised against us.
Bon appetit.
When we talk about the gaze of the camera in film and cinema (and TV) we’re often talking about 2 things in concert.
- The camera-stylo or camera pen, which comes from auteur theory.
- The male gaze, which comes from feminist theory.
The camera-stylo or camera pen is when an auteur (a director who so influences the style of their films that they might be viewed as an author of that film) directs a piece of cinema, and we see the camera working as their pen.
Its particular pen strokes, where it stops or lingers, the style of its movements, all of these come together to form the director’s “handwriting”, and this…
