As gay as it gets.

I was watching the super bowl with Lea DeLaria, the stand-up comic who could be mistaken for Lou Costello. Lea's famous for opening her act by racing across the stage and bellowing at the top of her lungs, "Good evening! I'm a b-i-i-ig dyke!" In a room full of gay boys pretending to watch the Super Bowl -- which is, let's face it, the Academy Awards for straight people -- Delaria was the only one actually following the game. Not only following it but capable of explaining it to the puzzled faces around her. The rest of the group looked at the set only when Martha Reeves and the Vandellas came out to sing during the "Tribute to Motown" halftime show (and it's probably time for Smokey Robinson to stop singing "Take a good look at my face," at least in close-ups on TV, if you know what I'm saying).

So Lea was lecturing a group of highly educated professionals on the finer points of first downs, onside kicks, and tight ends, the last of which actually got their attention for a minute. You know, we all hate to see stereotypes being reinforced, but when you're part of a group of Hollywood gay boys listening to a pretty butch lesbian tell you about football, you're not only reinforcing a stereotype, you're living one. Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts to mainstream ourselves and prove we're as Normal As Anyone, we suffer a tiny lapse.

The networks must have suspected this would happen. On CBS they countered the game with a rerun of the Bette Midler Gypsy. PBS had an evening of Kander and Ebb and Julie Andrews, and Comedy Central ran an Absolutely Fabulous marathon. Even the old-movie stations, which run tons of Westerns, war movies, and gangster pictures, were running daylong blocks of musicals. Think their marketing people all read the same memo?

I was thinking about -- let's not call it stereotypical -- conventional gay behavior during one of the breaks in the Super Bowl telecast (that would be when the teams were playing) when someone mentioned how good he thought Greg Kinnear was in the James Brooks comedy As Good As It Gets. If you haven't seen it, he plays a successful New York painter with a swell apartment who, when he gets beaten up, seems to have no health insurance, no sales, no friends, and nowhere to live. Oh, yes, and he's gay -- primarily, as far as I could tell, so he can serve as a nonsexual plot device later on to help the straight hero and heroine get together.

Don't get me wrong. Kinnear is very good in this movie, and he has a good shot at winning the Oscar. But I wonder what about his performance makes him gay. Other than the script's telling us, repeatedly, that he's gay, when does he have a moment of overt homosexuality? Is there intimacy with a man? Is there physicality? Is there even anything stereotypical, other than a cuddly dog and an even more ambiguous manager, played with strategic jewelry by Cuba Gooding Jr.? Do shy smiles and a certain softness make a nonentity gay? (Of course, compared with Jack Nicholson, DeLaria is soft.) In the absence of a fully realized character -- and for all the big scenes they've given him, I don't think he has one here -- Kinnear shows admirable restraint in not falling into a stereotype to make his point. Maybe that's what my friend meant.

In My Best Friend's Wedding, Rupert Everett, who was overlooked by the Academy, is allowed to exhibit all the showy, big-city gay mores because he's passed off as a straight man pretending to be gay when he is really a dyed-in-the-vicuna queen. So he gets to be a gay man making fun of gay stereotypes. Sophisticated and elegant in his real life, he exaggerates his mannerisms to convince straight people -- who, presumably, otherwise wouldn't know -- that he's gay. This is a funny comment and, to my mind, much more believable than what Kinnear is asked to play.

Everett's flirting with Julia Roberts seems real, as if he could possibly take a plunge with her. Kinnear's flirtation with Helen Hunt is pure plot contrivance. The Everett character is a whole person, not just a gay person. Ultimately that's what will happen in movies and TV as gay characters move to the next level. Gay life, as lived at Super Bowl parties, will just have to catch up.