Gay noir

Brandon and Philip are implied coded lovers, who used the crime of murder to stimulate each other as if it were a sex act. The intellectual discourse they have at the beginning of the picture is overshadowed by the sexual banter that precedes what ultimately will become the act of committing a murder.

Eddie Muller’s List of Film Noir’s Top 10 (maybe) Gay Couples

I know from work within the gay movement how widespread these images still are among gays and non-gays alike. It is important then to understand these images as one aspect of the armory of gay oppression and indeed of sexual oppression generally. How gays are represented is always part and parcel of the sexual ideology 1 of a culture and, as I hope my examination of film noir shows, indicates the complex, ambiguous ways in which heterosexual women and men are thought and felt about in that culture.

Chapter 3 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:

In the Spotlight affords an aspiring author the chance to be the front person for a literary hoax — and discovers a far worse fate than rejection. The once handsome Rafi has a recently disfigured face that makes it difficult for him to meet other men. When a close friend introduces him to Joe, Rafi feels strangely drawn to the stranger.

Gay Noir Series by Olivier Bosman

But Randy Van is one of the few queer characters who gets consistently sympathetic treatment from Hansen. For, although Brandstetter himself, as an out gay man, was a revolutionary figure in crime fiction, he was also virtually without a community and so cast a fairly jaundiced eye on most of his fellow homosexuals.