Yet, despite their relative prominence for more than a decade, they remain vastly under-examined areas in scholarship on both film genre and lesbian culture. It contends that these films have emerged as the predominant (and perhaps only) form of mainstream lesbian feature film in the United States of America in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s. This study identifies and analyses this sub-genre. This study argues that Bar Girls and Go Fish represent the first in a group of films whose numbers and similarities enable their consideration as a romantic comedy sub-genre, namely the ‘lesbian romantic comedy’. ABSTRACT: Six decades after the romantic comedy emerged as a Hollywood genre in 1934, the first romantic comedies with a central lesbian couple, including Marita Giovanni’s Bar Girls and Rose Troche’s Go Fish, were released in 1994. Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere Kelly Ann McWilliam BA (Hons), GC Arts A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in May 2006.
Subsequently, this paper asserts that White's text forms part of a growing contemporary discourse within western culture that advocates the importance of gay marriage and long-term intimacy by asserting its non-heteronormative and uniquely potent emotional and poetic nature. Ultimately, it will argue that long-term intimacy, the result of relationships that occur between two individuals over a period of time, offers unique emotional substances that are eulogised by White to be especially fulfilling for his eponymous gay protagonist. It will survey White's depiction of friendship, homosexual 'cruising' encounters, monogamous flings, heterosexual marriage and extra-maritial affairs.
However, considering White's novel within the context of contemporary demands for gay marriage, and contemporary advocations of the intimacy contained within long-term pairing, this paper will outline the particular forms of intimacy offered by different relationships within White's novel. An overwhelming amount of critical discussions of intimacy post Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's "Sex In Public" (1998) consider the belief that long-term, monogamous relationships are particularly intimate, to be the result of 'heteronormative' discourse. This paper provides a reading of Edmund White's recent novel Jack Holmes and His Friend (2012), which demonstrates the importance of the concept of long-term intimacy within this text.
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