All the wrong moves.

CenterStage joins a long line of films that disrespect--or disregard--the gay presence in the dance world

My friend Lloyd had just come back from seeing Center Stage, Nicholas Hytner's silly new movie about young ballet trainees in love. "I've got news for you," he said confidentially. "It's no Turning Point."

I've got news for Lloyd. The Turning Point was no turning point, at least not for the treatment of gay dancers in the movies. And here's some news for the people who make those movies: There are thousands of homosexual people in the dance world. Maybe even a couple more than there are in the military world.

But movies about the ballet world have wanted to make it uncontestably clear to their intended mass audiences that male dancers are not light in their toe shoes. Since such early classics as Ben Hecht's The Specter of the Rose (1946) and Powell and Pressburger's damnable (but beautiful) The Red Shoes (1948), the dancers in ballet dramas have been screamingly hetero in their off-stage passions.

The influx of out gay artists in Hollywood seems to be of little help. Every ballerina in The Turning Point (scripted by gay screenwriter Arthur Laurents) seemed to want to pounce on the testosterone-breathing Mikhail Baryshnikov. Director and former choreographer Herbert Ross did his best to reassure audiences that Shirley MacLaine's screen son, Ethan (Phillip Saunders), who studiously attended ballet classes, was a swaggering, baseball jersey--wearing, all-American young plug.

In contrast to lusty stallions Baryshnikov and Saunders, the only gay character was a snippy little rice paper of a choreographer who we're not supposed to like because he rebukes Anne Bancroft for being too old. "You're showing your ambivalence," the artistic director says, reprimanding him, "and I'm not talking about your personal life."

The token gay character in Center Stage, from out director Nicholas Hytner, has no personal life. Erik, one of two people of color among the leads, lends support and succor to his fellow students while they are running around having dates. As played by the personable Shakeim Evans, he is also noticeably more effeminate than his fellow male dancers. "You're cute," he coos in mincing tones at costar Sascha Radetsky, who grunts back something about his girlfriend in Seattle dumping him. And these are their opening lines. Screenwriter Carol Heikkinen makes a clumsy, not to say desperate, point of defining the sexual orientation of every male character within the first five minutes of the film. The guys pant after the girls, and the girls pant back in unison. So much for showing ambivalence.

On those rare occasions when queers emerge forthrightly in ballet films, they are punished for their openness. Sound familiar? To their enduring credit, both Nijinsky (also directed by Herbert Ross) and Alive and Kicking at least attempted to confront issues that gay dancers faced during the respective periods in which they were set. But if Jason Flemyng called other dancers on their insensitivity in Alive and Kicking, he also succumbed to AIDS. George de la Pena wound up in a straitjacket in Nijinsky, muttering "I am Nijinsky, I am life."

In Center Stage, Erik breaks his leg just before the big climactic audition at the New York State Theatre, conveniently allowing the movie's resident womanizer (real-life American Ballet Theatre headliner Ethan Stiefel) to take over. When we actually see the dance, it's an overheated romantic triangle that has two guys competing lustily for the hand of a woman (in actuality choreographed by that Broadway expositor of hetero values, Susan Strohman). Obviously complying with the same draconian rule of thumb that keeps Hollywood actors chained inside their closets, Center Stage infers that its audiences would not buy an out gay performer in such an assertively straight romantic role.

Yet gay dancers win over audiences and critics in straight roles onstage all the time. Unfortunately, too many of them take that act offstage as well, which is why we shouldn't expect enlightened films about queer ballet dancers any more than we should expect intelligent depictions of gay athletes. For every out dancer like Bill T. Jones or New York City Ballet's Robert La Fosse, ten spend their careers in silence, mired in their own version of "don't ask, don't tell."

Who knows? Perhaps we're making progress. Where gay screen characters used to have to commit suicide or be otherwise killed off, they now merely have to break their legs. But if this is the good news, somehow I don't think Vito Russo (whose anger at our screen depictions became his book The Celluloid Closet) is dancing in his grave over it.

Find more on Center Stage and links to related Internet sites at www.advocate.com

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.