A Queer Romance

Book excerpt: It's here and it's queer - popular culture inhabits all our lives, whether it comes in the form of movies or magazines, TV or shopping. A Queer Romance brings together critics, writers and artists to debate the possibilites of popular culture for lesbians and gay men. In a collection that is in-yer-face but never out-to-lunch, the contributors variously revisit debates about the gaze to provide a new theory of Queer viewing; discuss texts coded as queer - from lesbian vampires to Hollywood's use of gay codes in mainstream films such as Top Gun and Black Widow; consider the sexual and cultural narratives at play in the world of home shopping catalogues; explore the pleasures and perils of gay cultural production, from the radically queer film-making of Monika Treut to the wild world of homocore fanzines, and address the possibilities of texts claiming to be for the gay spectator - from pornography `by women, for women and about women' to `Out' TV. The contributors to A Queer Romance don't all agree but, taken together, the collection argues strongly that everyone can have their queer moments.