The changing image of the hero in Hindi films

Beneath the surface of the Bollywood cinema is a percolating gay culture trying 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 increased homoeroticization, with his body becoming a spectacle at every turn. Unfortunately, what has facilitated this is a veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) 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 audience itself is invited to see the macho (and perhaps narcissistic) hero as unattached and therefore available for homoerotic desire.