Hot copy: in 1997 the mainstream media learned that whether it's heroines, villains, or mystery men - gay sells.

Last January the ratings of the ABC sitcom Ellen were way down, and the critics were getting nasty. The previous fall, rumors had begun circulating that Ellen Morgan, Ellen DeGeneres's character on the show, might come out as a lesbian. But DeGeneres was nervous and noncommittal, and by January nobody was taking her hints seriously anymore.

In January no one had ever heard of Andrew Cunanan. He hadn't yet sunk into depression or probably even thought about buying that one-way ticket to Miami.

In January Gianni Versace was unaware that his fame would ultimately be his death sentence. He was in Paris for haute-couture week, having regained his strength after a year battling inner-ear cancer.

In January Tom Junod, the reporter who would eventually write the outing-that-wasn't-really-an-outing of actor Kevin Spacey, had yet to sign his lucrative contract with Esquire.

In January no one guessed that gay men and lesbians would be splattered across the headlines throughout the year. Even fewer would have expected that 1997 would be remembered as the year the mainstream press would itself make headlines for its coverage of gay and lesbian stories.

Now that DeGeneres has triumphed, it's hard to remember how many twists and turns marked the path to her coming-out At first her publicists insisted that only her TV character would come out, not the woman herself. Media coverage built only when it became clear that Disney, which owns ABC, would allow the coming-out episode to air. Once Hollywood executives realized that gay subject matter could sell sitcoms, editors suddenly decided that gay stories could sell news-magazines. "It was irritating that she had to negotiate so long to be herself," says Village Voice columnist Michael Musto. "But the Ellen thing really brought us into the future."

Not all at once, however. DeGeneres had often been outed in print, but since she herself hadn't publicly said anything, the media tiptoed around the story, and DeGeneres was only "rumored" to be a lesbian. Amid the rising speculation, papers in the South ran polls and on-the-street interviews that yielded a torrent of antigay bigotry at Ellen's expense. It didn't matter. DeGeneres's cause had acquired an unstoppable momentum.

By April, when DeGeneres did come out, it was with a media bombardment that began with the YEP, I'M GAY cover of Time. It wasn't a tough decision" to put her on the cover. says Walter Isaacson, Time's managing editor. "She was a high-visibility person changing our perceptions of the way gay men and lesbians are portrayed in popular culture."

Two weeks later Oprah Winfrey (who played Ellen Morgan's therapist on the coming-out episode) dedicated a show to DeGeneres and her new lover, Anne Heche. Winfrey gave airtime to the opposition but highlighted DeGeneres's self-confidence, talent, and bravery. Diane Sawyer's interview with DeGeneres, shown on ABC's 20/20 and PrimeTime Live, was similarly glowing. Now surprisingly after such a media blitz, the ratings for the coming-out episode were the highest ever for Ellen and, except for the Academy Awards show, the highest for any ABC program during the 1996-97 season.

America was less admiring when it came to the star's determination to be visibly gay in the real world too. When DeGeneres cuddled with Heche at the White House the same media outlets that had praised her just weeks before turned, The New York Times criticized he couple's "ostentatious" display of affection, in front of the president. People quoted the wife of a cabinet member who called the display a "freak show."

Gay author Michelangelo Signorile says this negativity comes from the age old belief that gay sex is linked to evil. In the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, he wrote, "While de-emphasizing same-sex physical affection fits the pop culture ideal of the Good Gay, lesbians and gay men who express their sexual passions ... are targeted as Bad Gays." Take Cunanan, for example. Just two weeks after the Ellen coming-out episode aired, he arrived on the national scene. His fourth murder occurred in New Jersey, close enough to the national media's New York headquarters for his killing spree to make the newsmagazines. Still, not until Cunanan resurfaced in Miami on the morning of July 15 and shot and killed fashion designer Gianni Versace did he become notorious internationally. For the week that followed the murder. Cunanan was at the center of a media maelstrom that, as Alan Acosta wrote in The News Watch Project Journal, proved "The ascension of O.J. journalism was now complete."

The media's handling of Cunanan was the opposite of their handling of DeGeneres. A similar media blitz resulted but without control or though given to the method behind the journalists' madness, This was breaking news, loaded with blood, kinky sex. and world-famous celebrity.

The epitome of Signorile's "Bad Gay," Cunanan made great copy. "It was an incredibly sexy story, and it gave people license to go as tabloid as they wanted," says Liz Tracey, a spokeswoman for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog group. "I was really saddened by the display of the stereotypes of gay men. In drag, sick, diseased, killing people, whether by HIV or hammers -- all that still lurks beneath the surface."

In the competitive, warlike atmosphere of breaking news, any new idea, any vague conjecture, is reported. But when it came to Cunanan, many news organizations went too far. The New York Post called him a "blood-thirsty gay serial killer," and Tom Brokaw, on NBC Nightly News, called him a "homicidal homosexual." The host of CNN & Company asked an expert on serial killers whether sexual perversion was linked to violent behavior. Newsweek even suggested that by killing himself with a gunshot through the mouth, Cunanan was mimicking oral sex. "It was a bad example of what happens when hysteria takes over," says Leroy Aarons, founder and former president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

James Fallows, editor of U.S. News & World Report, the one major news organization that didn't give much ink to the story, says many stories are simply fascinating stories. "A lot of events have larger meaning, but some events are just events," Fallows says of the Cunanan-Versace drama.

Cunanan was nevertheless a big and very profitable story, for obvious reasons. Time, Newsweek, and People all did cover stories. As did New York magazine. Its controversial Cunanan tie-in, titled "Trophy Boys," dealt with the class and age issues involved in May-December prince-pauper gay relationships. Maer Roshan, an openly gay deputy editor at New York who cowrote the story, says he was "personally attacked" for his part in the article. "I was the gay guy giving away family secrets," says Roshan. "But it's a legitimate issue to talk about -- class division and issues of age." Not to be outdone, Hollywood is taking Roshan's story to the screen -- in addition to four other films based on Cunanan.

As the gay press has learned through bitter experience, reporters -- whose livelihood often depends on access to celebrities -- must walk a tightrope when writing about gay people, even people just rumored" to be gay. When Junod began his cover-story profile of Spacey in Esquire with the widespread rumors that Spacey is gay, he tripped. Titled "Kevin Spacey Has a Secret," the story's actual secret turns out to be that Spacey is a movie star. His sexual identity is left up in the air -- sort of.

The story didn't garner the public obsession DeGeneres and Cunanan did. But by outing but not really outing Spacey, Junod and Esquire made the tabloid television shows as well as most newspapers and newsmagazines and provoked a debate in both gay and mainstream news organizations.

Spacey was furious. In the story he said of the rumor, "I have no interest in confirming or denying that at all." After the article appeared he released a statement calling Esquire "dishonest and malicious." Junod and his editor, David Granger, insist they did nothing wrong. Junod says he was trying "to play with questions of what is identity; where does life end and art begin."

Some gay media watchers were underwhelmed. "A maniacal editor and an incompetent reporter created an absolute, unmitigated disaster," says Charles Kaiser, a media critic and author of The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996.

Signorile, who virtually invented outing in the 1980s, disagrees. "I thought it was fine to discuss the sexuality of a well-known figure," he says. "When you're talking about anyone who's out to so many people in his personal life, when is his secret something that can't go in the paper? "

Ultimately, the Esquire mess says more about the current state of the media than either DeGeneres or Cunanan does. The obsession with Ellen was not shocking; neither was the media orgy surrounding Cunanan. But Junod's article showed that as gay stories have moved from the gay press to the mainstream media, the rules for talking about homosexuality have not been defined -- or at least they have not been defined well enough.

Still, confusion and ignorance are better than loathing and denial. "More and more people get the message," says Tracey. What's refreshing is that previously when I would read a well-done [mainstream] story that reported on the lesbian and gay community, I always assumed the writer was lesbian or gay. Now I don't do that anymore. That's a great step forward for journalism, not just for the lesbian and gay community "