ABSTRACT
In order to clarify the potency and pertinence of this threat, I want to take a closer look at the rare occurrences in Hollywood film in which anal sex actually is represented. In a revealing twist on the visibility/invisibility double bind of gay representation, anal sex is indeed visible in film multiplexes across the country, but the catch is, it can be presented only as an act of rape. Cinema in the 1990s has been the site
£ I of the proliferation of the "children of Deliverance." Films such as The Prince of Tides (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Sleepers (1996), and, most recently, Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), and American History X (1998) have centered on a scenario in which boys or men are raped by other men. What is intriguing about this group of films is the way in which male rape becomes symbolically coded as homosexuality despite occasional narrative attempts to avoid this dangerous collapse of meanings.
