The importance of cinema for gay and lesbian audiences As a medium of communication and self-identification: community building. Fashioning a form of alternative spectatorship and creating a subculture. Cinema and performance: The importance of expressing gay identity through nongay representations as an important strategy of subverting and contesting a sexually repressive culture.

Gay and lesbian film theory Critique of stereotypes. Defining an independent film culture. Institutional films. Confrontational films. Affirmation films. Queer cinema as counter-cinema. Defining the activity of the queer spectator.

Defining an independent film culture Institutional films. Linked to the establishment of gay cultural and political institutions. In dit teken (Netherlands, 1949), COC. Activist documents. Confrontational films. “Zapping” and symbolic terrorism. Nicht der Homosexuelle is pervers, sondern die Situations in der er lebt (Rosa von Praunheim). Taxi zum Klo (Frank Ripploh). Affirmation films. Positive image films: Word is Out (1977). Coming out films. Queer cinema.

Defining the activity of queer spectatorship Emphasizing the difference and creative activity of spectatorship. Richard Dyer: ”[The expression of gayness through non-gay representations is an important strategy of subversion for gays in relation to the cinema. This subversion may be in the films and/or in our response to them; the gay sensibility may be at work at the point of production ('encoding') and/or at the point of consumption ('decoding'). Either way it goes against the grain of the film and the culture...." Spectatorship as an active and creative reappropriation of film for new positions of identity, meaning, and desire.

Theories of queer spectatorship Critiquing heterosexist assumptions in psychoanalytic film theory, including feminist theory. Challenging the formalism of theories of narrative, apparatus, and identification. Defining spectatorship as a performative and creative activity. Appropriation and camp. Camp as a critical practice. Queer theory.

Camp as a critical practice An assertion of identity or self-integrity: a temporary means of accommodation with society where art becomes both an intense mode of individualism and a form of protest. Through performance, making something positive from a discredited social identity. A way of expressing the idea that all sexual identity is masquerade and performance or sexual theatricality.

The stakes of “queer” theory Appropriation of homophobic approbation. Theory as a detoured and detouring space: critique and subversion of repressive sexual definitions. Gay/lesbian is not a binary grouping, but a complex spectrum of practiced sexualities and lived identities. “Queer” posed as the range of identities and potentialities of desire that elude the binary norms of presumptive heterosexuality.