The changing image of the hero in Hindi films

Beneath the surface of the Bollywood cinema is a percolating gay culture tr ying to break free, waiting for the moment to emerge from subtext into text . For now, in what we might now call a period of transition, the Bollywood hero has been (particularly in the past three decades) the focus of increas ed homoeroticization, with his body becoming a spectacle at every turn. Unf ortunately, what has facilitated this is a veiled (and sometimes not-so-vei led) form of misogyny, in which the heroine's role is minimized such that, rather than another filmic character falling in love with the hero, the aud ience itself is invited to see the macho (and perhaps narcissistic) hero as unattached and therefore available for homoerotic desire.