By Michael Kearns
Photo by Zack Goldberg

If this year's Oscar nominations are a barometer, movies are a bit limp when it comes to illuminating the LGBT experience—in spite of titles like The Queen and Little Miss Sunshine—while there appears to be a prodigious assembly line of gay characters parading on television these days. Only a year ago, the sinewy Oscar-nominated Brokeback Mountain, which depicted gay characters in cowboy drag rather than showgirl drag, was perceived by many as a door opener for Gay Hollywood. Think again.

Like all of his hyperstylish films, Pedro Almodóvar's Volver crackles with gay subtext but director Todd Field (Little Children) deliberately chose to avoid the lesbian fling that is depicted in the book that inspired the screenplay. While Steve Carrell's Uncle Frank jumps off the screen and directly into our hearts in Little Miss Sunshine, Stanley Tucci's Nigel (The Devil Wears Prada) is an all-too-familiar fop: the persnickety, eye-rolling designer foil.

While gay sensibility saturates the silver screen (with Dreamgirls being the classic example), gay characters appear more often on television screens, albeit screechingly stereotypical and/or sexually ambiguous (both found in the lovable Ugly Betty). Then there's the is-he-or-isn't-he? actor who seems a tad too facile putting on false eyelashes and sashaying in heels (John Mahoney in a stupefying ER guest star gig).

The glitz-and-glam musical qualifies as a gay movie if only because of Jennifer Hudson's brand of stand-by-your-man self destructiveness, a staple in the canon of plots considered fabulous by gay men who identify with the doomed diva, dating back to Judy's quivering delivery of, “My name is Mrs. Norman Maine.”

Yet no character in the gay-directed and gay-produced blockbuster (or any other Oscar-nominated film) portrays a character's homosexuality with tingling flesh-and-blood authenticity that is found in ABC's Brothers and Sisters.

Writer and film critic (LA Weekly) Chuck Wilson says, “Television is where America rights itself, where it learns how to be better. Think of a show like All in the Family and how it forced Americans, such as my very own father, to confront, through humor, its deep-seated prejudices and biases. Television is intimate, it's up close, it speaks to us more directly than the distant movie screen.

“A couple of months ago, I was visiting my father and stepmother in Alabama,” Wilson continues, “and we were watching Brothers and Sisters, which they'd never seen, and when the gay son kissed his boyfriend full on the lips and pulled him into the apartment for sex, my father didn't make a sound, as he certainly would have when I was a teen. And I wondered if that scene had caused shock waves in some other living rooms, if it gave a teenage gay person a jolt of excitement and then hope, or brought that kid's parents closer to some sort of understanding, which might serve them later when they discover who their child really is.”

What television (and the Internet) also provides, religiously and relentlessly, is enticingly gay gossip about actors and actresses that juicily contradicts or confirms their offscreen personas. Wilson poses the question, “Would people have been able to sit still during Brokeback's love scenes if Jake or Heath were an out gay actor?

“I doubt it,” he concludes.

However, mainstream movie audiences will have no trouble buying John Travolta's upcoming drag turn in Hairspray because a) he'll be wearing a big dress instead of a big cowboy hat and b) he's conveniently married to Kelly Preston. “If Tom Cruise really is gay, he's not stupid for keeping it a secret,” Wilson suggests. “Sad maybe, but in terms of career, not foolish, not at all.”

A double standard, however, exists for women who are presumed (or fantasized) to be lesbians. Take sirens Penelope Cruz (Volver) and Salma Hyeck (Ugly Betty). Rumors of their offscreen steamy teaming serves to fuel the libidos of straight hetero men (and perhaps a few hetero women). The case of ex-extraterrestrial Anne (Now-I'm-a-lesbian, now-I'm-not) Heche (Men In Trees) fulfills yet another version of the American Dream—not only did she come to her senses in terms of choosing men (in trees) over women (in pants), she's evolved into a man-hungry hussy.

Television's Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother) and T. R. Knight (Grey's Anatomy), are gay actors who don't have to be one to play one—straight men, that is. However, one must remember that they were camouflaged in the closet when cast on those popular shows.

About Harris and Knight, Wilson says, “I do wonder if they'll get work down the road, when their hit shows end. They probably lie awake wondering the same thing. Because let's face it, would Sean Hayes have gotten to play Jerry Lewis in that TV movie if he'd been out? I tend to think not.”

In 2007, the Hollywood closet remains as cemented in the culture as Rock Hudson's star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame.

Michael Kearns can be reached at www.michaelkearns.net.