Celluloid sounds.

With the rise of gay films and (surprise!) believable gay characters in Hollywood, the number of gay movie sound tracks--both new and newly reissued--has also boomed. The summer's big sound track to the smash hit My Best Friend's Wedding (Work/Sony) features Ani DiFranco reworking the Dusty Springfield classic `Wishin' and Hopin'." In & Out's newly released sound track (Motown) includes Diana Ross's version of the Gloria Gaynor chestnut "I Will Survive," while the soon-to-be-released Boogie Nights sound track (Capitol) features a wide array of disco classics.

The marriage of movies and pop music has meant big business for both Hollywood and the record industry. Sound tracks are a multiplatinum institution, but often the goals of the media and the public are at cross-purposes. In most cases pop sound tracks are more concerned with retailing than evoking a filmgoer's cinematic memories. More often than not much of the music these records offer is only marginally in the movie, if at all.

Gay movies aren't immune to these artless marketing techniques. And the mixed-bag selections on sound tracks such as My Best Friend's Wedding, not to mention The Birdcage and Philadelphia, reflect that intent. The best of them, however, can reflect our sensibilities as they tell our stories. Here are some offerings that are, well, out there:

Although John Waters's camp classic Pink Flamingos is now 25 years old, it's only with the film's anniversary rerelease that it's finally been granted its own sound-track album (Hip-O). Compiled by Waters himself, this collection of "filth music," as he calls it in the credits, gathers sick little numbers from the '50s and early '60s that drip with greasy sexual innuendo and sleazy rock-and-roll swagger. Where else can you get Little Richard's "The Girl Can't Help It," Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers'

"I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent," and Patti Page's "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window"?

The sound track to Beautiful Thing (MCA) similarly puts a new slant on old tunes, which, in this case, are all sung by Manna Cass--either solo or with her fellow Mamas and Papas. Nearly half of this virtual of this virtual greatest-hits album doesn't appear in the movie. Yet these wistful love songs and gentle anthems of self-determination (Make Your Own Kind of Music) not only evoke the film's Cass-obsessed character it also capture the bitter sweet budding romance between her two young gay neighbors.

Unless you've seen the lamentably overlooked 1995 film Stonewell, its sound track (Columbia) won't make sense. Made up of girl-group classics that predate the first gay rights riot in 1969, the album includes songs like the Shangri-Las' "Give Him a Great Big Kiss," which is lip-synched in the film by drag queens whose routines comment on the plot like a traditional Greek chorus. The selections are inspired, and their inclusion makes official what gay men have though all along. Those bad girls with the big hair singing our songs.

Like Waters, Gregg Araki has built a career out of generating love-'em-or-hate-'em queer-sensibility-intensive cult films. Even before they commanded enough of an audience to justify a sound-track album, outsider cinema landmarks like Totally F***ed Up came packed with the kind of dark alternative rock and moody ambient tracks that fans dedicate their lives and incomes to tracking down. The sound track to his latest, Nowhere (Mercury), is based on his own collection of nonalbum single tracks and remixes by the likes of Radiohead, the Chemical Brothers, and Marilyn Manson. The heavy alienation and angst in abundance here are arguably just as queer as the latest disco-dolly affair.

Speaking of such beasts, there are plenty of club-conscious collections vying for the pink dollar since The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert became a phenomenon. And the soundtrack to Kiss Me, Guido (DV8) is typical, mixing gay disco standards ("So Many Men, So Little Time") with newly recorded dance cuts that mostly pale next to their source material. Much more worthy is the reissue of the Village People-intensive Can't Stop the Music (Casablanca), which includes the group's appropriately wacky gay anthem "Liberation."

Lesbian-oriented film sound tracks are just beginning to claim their own turf, and the jumble-sale quality of collections like Boys on the Side (Arista), All Over Me (TVT), and I Shot Andy Warhol (Tag/Atlantic) reflect the genre's ingratiating infancy. k.d. lang's languid, sometimes even funky score to Even Cowgirls Got the Blues (Sire/Warner Bros.) remains the one essential purchase because it delivers what the movie didn't--coherent meditations on love and freedom that capture the tenderness and fire of woman-to-woman relationships.

Those who live up to possessing the gay community's fabled disposable income might also want to investigate these other queer sound tracks of the '90s for the few great cuts they deliver: The Crying Game (SBK); Jeffrey (Varese Sarabande); Wigstock: The Movie (Sire); Postcards From America (London); Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (Matador); Threesome (Epic); To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Jule Newmar (MCA); and The Doom Generation (American).