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over a vertical wooden pole in a position that recalls popular renderings of the Jesus figure. This posing of Mike has resulted in numerous critics deeming the cover “G-String Jesus” and noting that Mike’s pose “[evokes] the crucifixion” (Breight, 1997, pp. 307-308). The rack of magazine covers combines past and present in a way that “unites Rome, Renaissance England and modern America in a bizarre politico-sexual triad” (pp. 307-308)—a notion that the caption on Mike’s magazine, “ GO DOWN ON HISTORY ,” reinforces.
    Both Scott and Mike (especially as portrayed by their magazine covers) draw on types of men that are summoned time and time again in the visual memory of heteronormative culture. The biblical reference to which Mike’s cover alludes, with his hands fixed up above his head and his nude body leaning backward (ribs protruding), recalls, recodes, and sexualizes the image of the nude body of Christ for homosexual consumption. Not only do these images of Mike and Scott suggest the homosexual potential in traditional icons, they make an explicit link between the male body, homosexuality, history, and male sex work.
    New Queer Cinema did much more for the representation of the male sex worker than simply allowing him to be gay without being pathologized; it allowed him to be queer, and it suggested that he always had been. These films exhibit a notion of the queer body that, according to Michele Aaron (2004), sees queerness as
    represent[ing] the resistance to, primarily, the normative codes of gender and sexual expression—that masculine men sleep with feminine women—but also to the restrictive potential of gay and lesbian sexuality—that only men sleep with men, and women with women. In this way, queer, as a critical concept, encompasses the non-fixity of gender expression and the non-fixity of both straight and gay sexuality. (p. 5)
     
    Whereas one would assume that all male sex workers (even American Gigolo ’s strongly heterosexual Julian) would exist outside of heteronormativity and would, therefore, on some level be considered “queer” under Aaron’s definition, pre-NQC cinematic representations of male sex workers (especially in American Gigolo and Midnight Cowboy ) depict a world where male sex worker protagonists are as far from a notion of queer as possible. The most revolutionary element of NQC in relation to the depiction of male sex workers, then, is that the characters of films such as My Own Private Idaho and The Living End are not simply gay gigolos and they are not merely inversions of the traditionally acceptable male sex worker attempting to provide a positive image of a type of homosexual: they are queer individuals in a way that the protagonists of earlier films could never be.
    The liberation and aggression with which these NQC films approached their subject matter, however, was not without controversy. When Araki described his work as not having “this propagandistic ‘It’s great to be gay’ outlook” in a 1992 interview in The Village Voice (Chua, 1992, p. 64), Adam Mars-Jones (1993), in a review for The Independent , saw this break from the desire for positive representation as a poor decision, given the timing of the AIDS crisis. “More than anything,” writes Mars-Jones, “it has been the catastrophe of AIDS, and the urgency of the despair it has brought with it, that has sparked ‘queer’ politics, and put patience out of fashion,” but, ultimately, “the AIDS crisis is a poor moment to pick quarrels” (p. 16).
    Interestingly, both Gus Van Sant and Gregg Araki have dealt with the male sex worker in their later films, too, but in strikingly different ways. While Van Sant has gone on to alternate between directing mainstream films for major studios and his own independent works, he has continued to be the executive producer of films that explore queer identity. 15 Incorporating the gritty aesthetic and aggression of the NQC, Speedway Junky (Perry,