Theorising the Queer Optique through Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This analysis has two interlinked goals. First, drawing on Lee Edelman, Dudley Andrew and Laura Mulvey, it theorizes the male homosexual optique, a mode of address that is predicated on the relationship between a film, its context of reception and its spectator, and which undermines the heterosexual exigencies of classical narrative style to implicitly address a gay male viewer. Second, it illustrates how the putatively heterosexual romance of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961) appeals to gay male spectators through two mechanisms that underpin the optique, specifically the homosexual gaze and characterization. Key to each of these aims is how the non-normative heterosexual male body functions as a site of gay male objectification and identification. This article ultimately argues that Harrington’s film enables us to envisage a queer cinema that is not predicated on fictions of homosexual desire but nevertheless provides a framework for deepening our understanding of what queer spectatorship (and the male homosexual gaze in particular) may involve.