In the following essay, Carrithers, focusing primarily on the movie version of The Boys in the Band, discusses the concept of the "gaze" in terms of a heterosexual audience and homosexual subjects and argues that the film's gay stereotypes work to the advantage of the heterosexual norm.

Few critics discussing spectatorship or the "gaze" of the spectator address the ways a heterosexual audience might view a film whose primary characters are homosexual. Even fewer of these critics address the ways such films attempt to accommodate these viewers. For a film to be successful, at least financially, it must attract the often larger heterosexual (straight) audience. A work such as The Boys in the Band (dir. William Friedkin), a 1970 Cinema Center Films release, modifies its images of gay sexuality in order to provide a "comfortable" experience for straight viewers. In films such as this one, which feature homosexual...