Anything but sex.

"GOOD MORNING, THIS IS THE HAYS GAYS OFFICE. WE PROTECT America's moviegoers from excessive on-screen homosexuality. We have a few notes about your script, which is about to be filmed. Although we have changed our Production Code and eliminated the requisite gay suicide at the end of the movie, you have violated several other sacred tenets of the code, and we wish to apprise you of them at this time. For example, you depict two gays in a double bed, when the code clearly states that only single beds may be used, and when two gays are occupying one of those beds, at least two of their feet must be on the floor."

"Can the other two be on the ceiling?"

"Look, sir, if you're not going to cooperate with us, we don't see how this movie can get made. At least not by a major studio."

This is a call I fully expect to receive any minute. The mainstream media have gone Vatican. Homosexuals are allowed to exist as long as they never have (homo)sex. Even the lingering kiss seems to be an object of nobody's affection. Nobody can get laid. Rupert Everett in My Best Friend's Wedding and Greg Kinnear in As Good as It Gets had a very dry white season. Ellen DeGeneres's character enjoyed lesbian sex (off camera, to be sure) on ABC, and you see where that led.

Paul Rudnick, a writer I admire boundlessly, went from a movie in which a gay man was afraid to have sex (Jeffrey) to a movie in which a gay man had no sex at all (In & Out). I never was sure what was running through that high school coach's head while he watched those boys hit the showers for 25 years, but no matter. The movie was so effective at neutralizing straight fears about gay people that Rudnick deserves some kind of Gaybel peace prize.

Likewise, Wendy Wasserstein's The Object of My Affection creates a universe in which the casual acceptance of gays in a straight world is unquestioned, and that's certainly refreshing. But you are asked to believe that an attractive man like Paul Rudd could come out of a four-year relationship with another man, move in with a strange woman, and never have so much as a phone call from any gay person he's ever met. Not to mention sex.

You also have to accept that a well-off old queen (Niger Hawthorne, working very hard at not being George Sanders in All About Eve) would harbor a cute young man in his home, never have sex with him, and allow him to carry on, unobserved, with tricks in the spare room. I mentioned this to a genuine old queen friend of mine (no, Louise, I'm not quite there yet), and he said, "Don't be ridiculous. That kid only tells Paul Rudd he's not having sex with the old queen. Wouldn't you if you were in his place? Of course he's having sex with him."

"Well, how come we're never shown any of that? Do you have to be an old queen to understand?"

"Not necessarily. They probably didn't want to offend the majority audience by showing an older man, shall we say, `facilitating' a younger man's lifestyle."

I can't believe Wendy Wasserstein, a woman I've never known to pull a punch, would consciously depict a relationship as anything less than real. But maybe, in a bid to reach the wider audience, she did. Whatever--it worked. Object and In & Out are adult mass-appeal faves. You can take your entire straight family to see them without fear. In fact, some friends of mine have been using them as informal teaching aids. They work very well because the only thing they're missing is the scary part: the sex.

Maybe I'm overreacting. At the moment I am in the throes of writing The Birdcage 2: A Family Outing, a picture about a couple of old queens very few people actually want to see having sex. Sex itself, not sexuality, is an issue in this script as well as a number of other things that create polarities within our community, like ageism, body worship, and peer group identities ("Are you leather or feather?"). I suspect that these issues will most bother the people who are paying the bills for this movie, not the fact that many of the characters are queer.

We're now at a polite stage, where it's OK to be gay, just don't give us too much information, you know? Even a farce has to be careful. The comedians W.C. Fields and Mae West had more battles with the Hays office, Hollywood's old draconian censorship board, than anyone else. Sex may sell, but the best items are apparently still kept under the counter.