Abstract
This paper documents and explains the frequency of one particular motif – boys or men going swimming – in gay male coming-out films produced between 1995 and 2015. To do so, it develops a methodology (distant watching) that allows researchers to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimate of a cinematic motif’s frequency within any given genre, without actually having to watch all the films in their corpus. It then explains the frequency of swimming scenes in coming-out films through a set of intersecting reasons – some legal, some economic, and some aesthetic. Finally, the paper demonstrates (a) that a better understanding of generic conventions yields interpretative gains in the discussion of individual cases, and (b) that swimming scenes are particularly frequent in one subgroup of coming-out films: those in which the protagonist is still struggling to establish a non-heterosexual self-identity.
Mühlheim, Martin