Two mainstream Hindi films in 2008, Dostana and Straight, had a gay main plot which was quite unprecedented in Bollywood. Through a close analysis of the way these two films engage with homosexuality and its representations, and by a discussion of the history of gay themes in Hindi popular cinema, this article tries to argue that while mainstream films are now able to foreground homosexual desire, they do this through an erasure of the female. This then lends itself to a patriarchal coding and leaves little s