Gay best friend: a history of Hollywood’s favourite queer character
Jun 02, 2023
4 minutes
Before the gay best friend could be phased out, he had to come out. Today, those three short words tend to denote the most confining limitations to queer characters in film, a trope and archetype designed to keep homosexuality on the sidelines, adjacent to the more palatable lives and loves of straight people. For a time, however, sassy support was about the best representation queer people could hope for on screen, even if it required some code-reading on the viewer’s part. In Code-era Hollywood, ascribing a sexuality at all to the waspish single man commenting on, or even assisting in, the protagonists’ own entanglement would have been a detail too far. He had a
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