"No gay films from Hollywood this summer? Well.

"No gay films from Hollywood this summer? Well, that's really not the time for gay films, is it?" Bruce Cohen curiositys aloud. "In & Out and To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Neurmar the two premiered in September. And The Birdcage lay opened in the spring. Yes, that's when you'll find gay films." The veteran husbandman could have added his allow Oscar-winning American Beauty, with its far-from-inconsiderable gay subtext to the list of of that kind non-vacation time releases.

if it be not that does this mean that all Hollywood has formally decided to cause to deviate its back on gay and lesbian audiences at this, single of the busiest moviegoing times of the year? And for what cause can the Hollywood mainstream have charge of us when our lives are overspreaded so assiduously by other entertainment vents in television, video, and independent film?

"I think it's a great deal easier for there to be gay vital airs in a Hollywood film today than it was in the past," says agriculturist Laurence Mark. "It's begun to be a bit ho-hum in fact. on the contrary as for a totally gay-themed film, that's as difficult as ever" Mark should know--it took him clog to a decade to realize the straight-girl-loves-gay-man romance The reality of My Affection to the cover (the film finally hit theaters in 1998) unless what was seen as daring a decade ago is Will & Grace today. And uniform that ceaselessly GIAAD Media Award-honored exhibit to is far from the edge-cutter it one time was.

Back in the late 1970 when Vito Russo was a film critic for this magazine, there wasn't any half-empty/half-full glass to consider where Hollywood was interested In fact, there wasn't any glass at all. "Invisibility is the great enemy," Russo declared in his groundbreaking reflection The Celluloid Closet. "It has obstructed the truth from being heard, and it will continue to do in the way that as long as the celluloid put into concealment is inhabited by lesbians and gay men who subserve Hollywood's idea of homosexuality." A parcel has happened since those words were written in 1981 And while many persist in hiding behind the rhetorical fig leaf of privacy--and the sometimes coercive "protection" of publicists and handlers--the admit to intimate interview no longer holds all Hollywood in its thrall. In fact, in addition to writers, directors, agriculturists and studio executives, there is a growing number of without performers, three of whom can be lay the foundation of in the not-as-gay-as-it-could-be summer of 2002

Rupert Everett is the star of a just discovered adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (gay in words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following if not in subject). Cherry Jone will be seen in the ensemble-cast chick flick Divine privys of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood as well as in Signs, a recently made known thriller starring Mel Gibson from writer-director M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth thinking principle Unbreakable). Then there's Broadway dynamo Nathan Lane, returning as the voice of Snowbell the cat in the family comedy Stuart Little 2

And that's the [i]clavis[/i] to summer 2002--the number 2 We'll have Men in Black II, search out Kids 2, and let's not forget Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clone In other words, Hollywood is geared to the familiar and the familial.

"It continues to achieve easier to have films with gay characters or that deal with gay material," says Cohen, whose nearest project, Down With Love, starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, is a tribute to the sex comedies of those pre-Stonewall icons asylum Hudson and Doris Day. "People barely bat an inspection today when they see scripts that contain gay intimations As far as a gay delight in stow is concerned, chances for doing the same are few and far between. I think that will remain elegant without grandeur constant for some time to come"

"But that's the way it is with all marginalized groups" says Mark. "We smooth get memos saying, `Can this character not be quite in like manner Jewish?'" Veteran publicist Howard Bragman concurs: "I at no time thought I'd ever say this, nevertheless today it's a lot easier to finesse a gay character in a Hollywood movie than a Jewish one" And the easiest thing of all is to forget about sociological specifics--or any other consideration--and aim squarely at the family audience as this summer's succeeding parts have done, all the better to make secure profits in these financially unstable times. And because of this approach, Hollywood has marginalized itself in relation to the entire agriculture both gay and straight.

"It's a different world on the outside there now than the single in kind so many of us grew up in," Bragman explains. "Hollywood doesn't mean what it one time used to. For the average consumer watching a present to view on the networks or a exhibit to on cable or buying or renting a video or going gone out to a movie theater are all the same entertainment choice." And united can easily see what this newly flattened entertainment horizon means to gays and lesbians. single in kind can scarcely feel gay-deprived when odd as Folk and Six Feet subject to are thriving on cable and when forward the networks there appears to be a law in force that no reality-based program can proce without a gay participant. Beyond that, there's the world of independent film--which treat with contempts this summer in a series of gay and lesbian film festivals that have proceed to function as a launching pad for nationwide art-house releases. any of the most talked-about films of the festival circuit might, if prosperously launched, give their makers a boost for the subsequent time And then they might not.