In the opening moments of the short British film Baby (WIZ, 2000), the close-up image of a hand brushing slowly against a bare chest triggers the film’s interrogation of the erotic potential in screening touch. Accentuated by a shallow focus on the individual body hairs and bumps of the protagonist’s skin, this suggestively haptic introduction at once emphasizes the centrality of vision in the filming of the sensual yet denies its epistemological mastery through the textural quality of its image. The film’s slow narrative structure, composed entirely of a series of erotically charged flashbacks during an act of masturbation, is matched by a lack of dialogue and by long, static takes of the naked and semi-naked bodies in and around a public swimming pool. During these flashbacks, the protagonist–played by a twenty-year-old Ben Whishaw–negotiates the homosocial hurdles of gender-specific changing rooms and communal showers. As he does so, his constant proximity to water, which envelops bodies and distorts the senses, provides a now familiar backdrop for the exploration of a developing sexuality and its concomitant potency for queerness. Moreover, as the suggestive smirk from a confident, muscular diver implies when his gaze meets that of Whishaw, the cinematic spaces of Baby are conceived as sites not only where the queer subject is able to find pleasure in looking, but where the eroticism of being looked at can often prove to be similarly as pleasurable. When both narrative and protagonist climax in the film’s closing moments–after a flashback of Whishaw removing his