Hollywood and the Killer Lesbian by Robert Cettl

Amidst the socio-sexual upheavals of the 1970s, Hollywood used a re-envisioning of the detective character from traditional film noir to essay the threat to heterosexual patriarchy posed by transgressive homosexuality. Thus, in one 1972 film emerged American cinema's way of dealing with that threat - the archetype of the Killer Lesbian was cemented! Starring James Garner as the detective and Hollywood veteran June Allyson as the killer lesbian, the film was buried in a wave of detective movies. Though long forgotten, the film remains the premiere example of how a fearful, reactionary and heterosexist Hollywood agenda sought to construct and validate stereotypes in order to deal with the perceived threat of the gay rights movement of the early 1970s. This was the moralizing propaganda of heterosexual patriachal authority and its need to sublimate women and police, control, demonize and ultimately eliminate lesbianism from ever achieving public acceptability.