This scholarship grew from the earliest writings that attempted to theorize camp as well as from an underground concern with rewriting the history of film with a place for gay people. It is for this reason that the study of LGBTQ issues in film and media has been a politically important area of scholarship- interrogating representations and readings and also considering films made by LGBTQ-identified directors. Arguably, negative stereotypes promote self-loathing in the queer spectator. And many young people growing up in relative isolation with questioning their gender have first identified with a queer character on screen. Given that, until fairly recently, many spectators may not have known someone who was identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ), the cinematic representations could fuel further homophobia or prejudice. One of the main concerns for queer activism has been how representations have colored public perception of queer minorities. Often sources of humor or horror, queer characters have appealed to audiences for generations. No matter how spectators read specific characters, people identified as queer have always appeared in cinema and television. Arguably, the spectator did not always read the character as queer and simply responded to the violation of gender propriety. For example, gay men were coded as effeminate-the stereotype of the sissy-while lesbians were represented as butch. Until the 1970s, queer characters in cinema were coded through a conflation of gender transitivity with sexuality. Queer characters, however, have been represented since cinema began, although only recently could they be labeled as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Whether explicit, as in the romance genre, or simply implied, as in other genres, heterosexuality has been the foundation of mainstream cinematic representations. Mainstream cinema’s dominant subject has always been heterosexuality.