Although there was male-to-male kissing in "Wings," the war story that won the first Academy Award for best picture in 1927, Hollywood censors ensured that from the '30s to the '60s, gay characters were either missing, ridiculed as sissies or depicted as predators. In "Tea and Sympathy" (1956), John Kerr was cured of his longing to be a "folk singer" by the womanly touch of Deborah Kerr (no relation). In "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), Sal Mineo was symbolically crucified for the sin of loving James Dean. Similar fates awaited the gay characters in "Suddenly Last Summer" (1959) and "The Children's Hour" (1961).

Yet because homosexuals were so vital to the Hollywood community, gay allusions were coded into the most mainstream of entertainments, such as "Ben-Hur" (which was co-scripted by the gay novelist Gore Vidal), "Red River" (starring the closeted Montgomery Clift) and the romantic comedies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

Hudson, born Roy Harold Scherer, was discovered and groomed by a gay agent named Henry Willson, who also supplied Hollywood with such tersely named heartthrobs as Troy Donahue and Guy Madison. To defuse rumors about his sexual preference, Hudson was forced to marry Willson's secretary, and the closest he ever came to revealing himself through his work was "pretending" to be a mama's boy to seduce Day in "Pillow Talk."

Another of Willson's beefcake boys was Tab Hunter (born Arthur Gelien). When the actor was in St. Louis recently to promote his memoir "Tab Hunter Confidential," he said he never questioned the rules of the game, which required him to "date" the latest starlets.

"I got to ride to movie premieres in a limousine with Natalie Wood. What's not to like?" Yet Hunter's longtime lover was Anthony Perkins, who arguably did immeasurable harm to gay awareness by playing a murderous transvestite in "Psycho." And even after Hunter did love scenes with the cross-dressing Divine in "Polyester" (1981) and "Lust in the Dust" (1985), he kept his sexuality a secret. "I didn't have the guts," he says.

The Stonewall riots of 1969, following a raid on a New York nightclub, were a turning point for the gay community, and Hollywood responded with positive portrayals of homosexual characters in "The Boys in the Band" (1970) and "Cabaret" (1972). Yet they were far outnumbered by the creepy stereotypes, in such movies as "Vanishing Point" (1971) and the gay-slasher film "Cruising" (1980).

Hollywood's first prestige film about a gay affair was "Making Love" (1982). The movie was a box-office failure. In "The Celluloid Closet" (1995), a documentary about the history of gay images in Hollywood film, "Making Love" screenwriter Barry Sandler recalls how a preview audience in Miami fled from the theater at the sight of two men kissing.

Although the human toll of the AIDS epidemic opened the door to the sympathetic portrayal of gay victims in "Parting Glances" (1986), "Longtime Companion" (1990) and "Philadelphia" (1993), gay men were rarely portrayed as happy or healthy.

Gay women enjoyed a slightly more positive profile, as innocent experimenters in movies like 1982's "Personal Best" and 1985's "Desert Hearts." But when they challenged traditional gender roles by poaching "straight" women, as in 1999's "Boys Don't Cry," they paid a terrible price.

Mainstream movies are now addressing a wide range of gender-identity issues. In "Transamerica," which opens here Friday, Felicity Huffman gives a remarkable performance as Bree, a pre-operative male transsexual on a road trip with a young gay hustler who doesn't know he's Bree's son. But director Duncan Tucker said when he was in town last month for the St. Louis International Film Festival that "Transmerica" is not a gay film at all. The uptight, academic Bree is a woman in a man's body. She only fathered a child in a moment of "lesbian" weakness.

Likewise, in the upcoming film "Breakfast on Pluto," Cillian Murphy plays a cross-dressing young Irishman who is so blithely confident in his identity that director Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game") doesn't include any scenes of either anguished introspection or sexual promiscuity.

Indeed, matter-of-fact portrayals of gay male sex remain virtually absent from Hollywood films. "Mainstream people dislike homosexuality," says the late memoirist Quentin Crisp in "The Celluloid Closet," "because they can't help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. When you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don't like that."

Bill Condon, the director of "Kinsey," recalls that the first time he ever saw two men kiss onscreen was in a British film, "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," in 1971. He and the rest of the audience gasped. Thirty-three years later, when Condon screened "Kinsey" in presumably liberal Los Angeles, a kiss between Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard drew the same reaction.

Sarsgaard currently stars in "The Dying Gaul," about a grieving screenwriter who has an affair with bisexual studio executive, played by Campbell Scott. The film includes a rare depiction of male copulation that leaves little to the imagination.

But it's the sex in "Brokeback Mountain" that is likely to be the most controversial - and the most liberating for our collective sense of how humans can interact. Hollywood has never shown a more mutually masculine love scene than the first one between campfire cowboys Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

In a recent phone interview, director Lee says he was astonished by the vigor of the scene: "I told them that they could never kiss a girl that hard."

But ultimately what makes "Brokeback Mountain" so powerful is the underlying tenderness in the relationship, which lasts for 20 years while the men maintain families elsewhere.

Lee explored a similar theme in his 1993 Taiwanese film "The Wedding Banquet." "It was the first time you saw male-to-male kissing in Chinese cinema," he recalls. "When I first showed it, I could feel 800 people taking a deep breath at once. It was funny, actually. But now they're more relaxed than American audiences. The whole concept of sin there is just a social convention."

Although Lee says that repression and longing have been the unifying themes in his work, from "The Wedding Banquet" through "The Ice Storm" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," he doesn't feel that "Brokeback Mountain" is making a social statement.

"In life, you can make statements, but in movies you have to go with drama and sincerity and spirit," Lee says. "The idea of a love story among ranch hands in a realistic version of the West may seem strange to some people, but I hope it distills the idea of romance into something poignant and universal."

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