With its status as a mainstay of wholesome "family" cinema, The Wizard of Oz seems an unlikely candidate for queer popularization, but generations of glbtq spectators have responded to this film in ways that have rendered it patently queer. Out of the seemingly banal tale of a young girl's trip through a fantasyland, queer spectators have interpreted a mytho-epic journey from mundanity into queer difference and have reconstructed the film as an empowering ur-text of queer survivalism and community.

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Some critics suggest that glbtq spectators learn almost as habit to read film symptomatically, to scour texts for casual signs of queerness--a "colorful" supporting character; an ambiguous line of dialogue; a furtive glance between same-sex characters--that may seem insignificant to the film's immediate narrative function but that enable the production of coded queer subplots.

Others claim that queer spectators prize film not so much for its stories, which are invariably heteronormative, but for its moments of spectacular transcendence and bewitching glamour--Dietrich in top hat and tails stooping to kiss a woman in the audience; Norma Desmond's staircase descent into madness; Mrs. Danvers' frenzied torching of Mandelay--and that they value these moments as symbolic gestures of social and sexual defiance.

Other critics again highlight extra-textual elements such as star gossip and their use by queer spectators to subvert the heterosexual coding of a given star and his/her roles, thereby rendering the star available for specifically queer identification. In this context, one could consider the films of a star such as Rock Hudson that are replete with all manner of queer double-meanings when read in light of knowledge of his homosexuality. Today that knowledge circulates more or less freely, but during the height of Hudson's stardom in the 1950s, it was available to queer spectators through discourses of subcultural gossip.

The common element across these diverse strategies of queer spectatorship is the desire to remake mainstream film in a way that better accommodates and supports queer interests and desires. Glbtq people have always shown great resourcefulness in making their own cultural meanings and spaces, often out of the very material of dominant culture that would seek to exclude them. Queer spectatorship is a potent example of this resistant creativity at work.

The diva has traditionally played a significant role in both gay and lesbian culture as an object of cult worship with whom those who suffer the heartaches of forbidden love and ostracism from an unaccepting society find solace and identification.

The queer community has used documentary film to resurrect historical memory and to permit the marginalized to bear witness, as well as to build an image base that reflects our diversity and counters distorted representations.

Since cinema began, Hollywood has been fascinated with finding ways of representing homosexuality.

The queer film festival circuit came into its own in the early 1990s and has since burgeoned into a major international phenomenon.

Independent films that aggressively assert homosexual identity and queer culture, the New Queer Cinema can be seen as the culmination of several developments in American cinema.

A distinctive American narrative genre that has developed over more than two centuries, the Western is now consumed worldwide; characteristically depicting homosocial relationships, it is also frequently suffused with homoeroticism.

Actress and cabaret performer Marlene Dietrich scandalized society almost as much by wearing trousers in public as by her numerous love affairs with both men and women.

The fragile persona and emotion-packed voice of actress and singer Judy Garland are powerfully linked to gay culture and identity; she appealed especially to gay men, but also to lesbians.

A product of Hollywood's star system, Rock Hudson became an international symbol of heterosexuality, wearing a mask until it was savagely ripped off when he was diagnosed with AIDS.