As in the previous chapters, we are concerned here not with films as revelative of specific identities, but as articulating forms of identity in symbolic terms. Our approach to discussing sexuality in film therefore is not determined by notions of ‘gay film’ and ‘lesbian film’ but instead is generated by a multifaceted concern with filmic representations of gay and lesbian identity. The groundbreaking work of Vito Russo has uncovered a history of gay representations in mainstream cinema, in ways similar to the work done on African American representations by scholars such as Bogle, Cripps, Leab and others in the 1970s. As Russo's explicit alignment with Bogle, quoted above, implies, the criteria for reading these representations derived from similar sources, notably the impetus to distinguish between positive and negative images which came from the culturalist turn of the black civil rights movement and the post-Stonewall liberation movements respectively. And also like the work on African American representations, registered presciently as above by Richard Dyer, these parameters have been problematised by critical work in the 1980s and 1990s.