Unauthorized Homoerotic Readings

The dangers of an unauthorized homoerotic reading seem to have been appreciated at the time. Thus, as here, the visual image can be manipulated to heterosexualize the message, and the woman plays the crucial role: the man in the upper left (one of the title characters in fact) has been replaced by a woman in the right-hand version. The malleability of the product is such that even the title can be changed. At the least, the insertion of the female changes the dynamics and offers a different visual narrative to the all male version.