In 1982, Paramount Pictures released a buddy-cop comedy called Partners. Police detective Benson (played by Ryan O'Neal) has to go undercover with police clerk Kerwin (played by John Hurt) in order to solve a series of murders in the local community.

The two men must also struggle to reconcile their different personalities and form a genuine working partnership. If this sounds like the typical buddy-cop story, it isn't, quite. The community in which the murders have been occurring is the gay community, and straight homophobic Benson has been ordered to pose as the lover of gay Kerwin, in hopes that together the two men will be able to flush out the killer.

The film was, at the time, highly unusual in presenting a story that revolved around a partnership between a gay man and a straight man. To this day, where gay male characters occur in film or television, there is a strong likelihood that their principle friendship will be with a straight female character. (Think My Best Friend's Wedding, or Will & Grace).

Gay men and straight women are presented by the media as natural allies, who both love to shop, groom, and talk about men. Gay men and straight men, by contrast, have long been presented in American culture as each other's polar opposites. When they are in a room together, the best that can be expected is uneasy tolerance, the worst, violence or murder. What could a gay man and a straight man possibly have in common?

Ironically, it is this perceived opposition that provides the basis for a comedy like Partners. Odd or oppositional-couple buddy pairs are nothing new. Indeed, they have become almost a cliché of the buddy genre. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch is the thinker and Sundance the doer. In the original series of Starsky and Hutch, Starsky's temper, energy, pop-culture interests and ethnic looks are contrasted against calm, thoughtful, educated, Midwestern-blond Hutch.

Partners broke new ground by allowing the difference between the two men to include sexual orientation. But this was presented to a mainstream audience as merely providing a new, hilarious and topical twist on a very traditional theme.

For a screenwriter happy to trade in stereotypes, the appeal of a gay male/straight male pairing isn't difficult to see. For the characters and conflicts seem to come ready-made. Gay men are all mousy, camp, effeminate, interested in housework and dress-making. Straight men are all masculine, brave, strong, and interested in action rather than emotions. The comedy will come from seeing the two types collide, from seeing their different methods of trying to deal with a situation.

And so it is in Partners--where, the trailer tells us, “Mr. Macho meets his mismatch” (Miss Match, ho ho). Benson is “100% all-male tough hero cop”. The apparently less than 100% male Kerwin is “his cover”. Cue scenes of Benson demanding “Are we on a case or a shopping expedition?” as Kerwin slips some laundry detergent into his trolley in a supermarket.

Later Benson tells Kerwin to “stop ironing my damn underwear! Guys don't iron other guys' clothes!” The poster for the movie features the two men in similar poses. Kerwin is happily holding a hair-drier to his head, while a disgusted Benson glumly holds a gun to his.

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