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In Where The Truth Lies, which focuses on the tangled fates of a Martin and Lewis-style 50s comedy duo, the differences between the two men don't really seem to have anything to do with sexual orientation. Firth's bisexual character is apparently calmer (though he brutally beats someone who insults his partner), slightly classier, the ‘straight man', as per Dean Martin. Bacon is more manic, wild, comic and rough-edged, as per Jerry Lewis.

Where The Truth Lies is not a ‘buddy movie', though it does have a buddy relationship at its core. But the other two films follow the ‘buddy genre' in having a pair of more-or-less equal partners who provide a support system for each other. The structure of The Matador is built around this: Brosnan helps out Kinnear, and then Kinnear helps out Brosnan.

In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Downey Jr.'s naive thief is initially dependent on Gay Perry, while still snarking about his sexual orientation and acting disgusted when Perry kisses him. But by the end of the movie, he is frantically performing mouth-to-mouth in an attempt to resuscitate Perry when he has been hurt.

The buddy movie has been the primary way in which male/male relationships have been represented, and idealized, in American culture. The fact that queer men are now being admitted into it demonstrates one of the many ways in which possibilities are broadening for gay and bisexual characters in film.

The three films do have one fairly glaring inequality. The straight men in all three stories have on-screen relationships with women. And the two bisexual men also have relationships with women. But none of the queer men has an on-screen, textual romantic relationship with a man.

Yet it could, in a way, be said that this is because their real ‘romance' is with their straight buddy partner. It has become common for critics to point to the buddy genre as containing a kind of sub-textual homoeroticism. Because it often presents the male/male bond as being more important than the male/female bond, and shows the two men winding up together rather than with women.

But in the past, this presentation has always depended on both men being at least nominally straight (perhaps so that the audience could feel confident that they weren't going to begin fooling around with each other as soon as they had disappeared over the horizon?)

One of the most intriguing things about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, in particular, is that it seems to suggest that even when a gay partner is introduced, this homoerotic subtext doesn't have to change. In the final scene of the film, Harry and Gay Perry are still together, and we are told that Harry is going to be working for Gay Perry in the future. Harry's female love interest, Harmony (played by Michelle Monaghan) is nowhere in sight.

Partners followed a traditional formula (even while breaking rules) by presenting its gay and straight partners as an old-fashioned, stereotype-inspired ‘odd couple'. The modern queer/straight buddy movie, with its equal and non-stereotypical partners, may seem like a radical innovation.

But what a film like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang seems to say is that, even when one of the partners is queer, all of the genre traditions can still be followed, down to the last detail. The two men will still walk off into the sunset at the end, and nothing has to change - even when one of them is straight, and one of them is gay.

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