Theorist ANDY MEDHURST (1998) claims that sexuality disrupt representation claims, like those made by Dyer (“How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation” Dyer, 1993), because in the REAL world you cannot ‘see’ sexuality. Unless someone tells you they are homosexual you have no way of knowing.

However, in the media stereotypes are used to explore ideological positions about sexuality. “Films and television comedies are full of images of gay men as effeminate screaming queens…It chooses that aspect of gay male behaviour (SELECTION), inflates it into the defining male characteristic of male homosexuality (MAGNIFICATION), then establish it as the most easily recognizable image (REDUCTION).”

“The ideological implications of stereotyping are obvious, since groups most liable to be stereotyped are those with LESS social and cultural power; indeed one crucial distinction between powerful and less powerful social groups is that the former hold the ability to stereotype the latter.”

“Stereotyping becomes ideological the moment it stops being simply a method of description and becomes a vehicle for values: the image of the screaming queen does not just mean ‘all gay men are like that’, it means ‘all gay men are like that and aren’t they awful’, which in turn means ‘and they are awful because the are not like us.”

“This is why stereotypes of sexuality strive so vigorously to create two, polarized sexualities, hetro and straight, and to insist with such obsessive reductiveness that people who belong to those poles are easily identifiable – hence the recurring presence across media texts of the screaming queen and his female equivalent the butch dyke.”