Summary

Halberstam’s sixth chapter begins with a section entitled “The Queer Gaze,” in which Halberstam considers the multiple viewpoints that can be taken of a piece of art, whether photograph, writing, or film, when that art was created by a queer artist or is being consumed by a queer audience. Halberstam uses this section to introduce the reader to the “Hays Hollywood Production Code,” which prohibited the sympathetic representation of “crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin” in Hollywood films throughout the mid-twentieth-century (177). These production codes generally censored all presentations of queer people and relationships.

In “The Positive Images Debate,” Halberstam discusses the balance that films must make between “offensive imaging and productive visibility” when portraying characters from minority populations, such as members of queer communities (180). The “positive images debate” specifically refers to the struggle between wanting to...