Lip service.

Straight guys who thumb through their girlfriend's copy of Playgirl--c'mon, there have got to be one or two women who read it--have often been known to close the magazine and pronounce with a certain authority that all the naked guys in there are gay. This is supposed to automatically make them

unattractive to the girlfriend. When the girlfriend tries the same strategy with a copy of Playboy, blithely announcing that all of the naked babes are lesbians, the boyfriend replies, with a leer, "Ya think so?"

It has ever been thus, students. Straight guys are so heartily invented in lesbian fantasy that when two women kiss on TV, the men are mesmerized, even if those women are Mariel Hemingway and Roseanne, a couple that quite a few lesbians might find less than scintillating. But two men kissing is a shock, a scandal, and a sure turn of the apocalypse. When the two men are not acting, it's even more dangerous. And not necessarily just to straight guys.

Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the composer-lyricist partners in life and art, gave each other a big smacker on the stage of the Tony Awards this year when they received their medal for Hairspray. There was some outrage, which surprised a lot of people who think no one straight even bothers to watch the Tonys. More surprising was that the outrage came from gay people. And theater people.

No less a personage than the Tony-winning lyricist of Cabaret, Fred Ebb, told an interviewer he thought it was a terrible display and that gay people should stop trumpeting their sexuality publicly. Fred Ebb, who gave Liza her z. Who peppered his work with sexual references and four-letter words and actually pioneered such practices on Broadway. Fred Ebb, telling us to keep it anything but real.

Of course, Mr. Ebb, who need apologize for nothing in his life or brilliant career--Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and many other--is in his 70s, girls, 70s. He comes from a generation that had to keep everything discreet, the secret society that dared not speak, etc., etc., and so forth. The idea that two younger men could dare to celebrate their lives publicly, as straight couples do in moments of ebullience, is pretty much incomprehensible to a man who came of age in an earlier time. Especially an American man. We have a tough time malting ordinary human behavior a part of our national fiber. We live in some dream world where people behave the way made-up history, tells us they behave.

In October the British soap opera Coronation Street, which has been the top-rated show in the United Kingdom since Elizabeth took the throne, featured two major gay characters kissing. The ratings were higher than ever, and it's doubtful there will be the sort of backlash feared by the people behind, say, Will & Grace, which is now seen several times a day in returns across America. After five seasons, poor Will Truman still can't seem to get past a tender hug with any of his boyfriends, even the ones he tells us he sleeps with.

The creative team makes vague references to letting Will get busy "when the time is right." With Will's home network, NBC, losing its two biggest comedies, Friends and Frasier, at the end of this season, Will looks to be the last man standing on top of the network's pile of sitcoms. Think NBC is going to feel this is the right time to storm one of the strongest barricades of the sexual revolution?

OK, it's bigger them the Tony Awards, but it is only make-believe. It's not like a baseball player coming out or a gay politician running for president. It's just a kiss. Of course, there's rarely "just a" anything on national television. If it's worth doing, it's worth promoting like a missile attack. But perhaps this isn't. Perhaps this is a moment that needs to be filmed without an audience and inserted without any advance warning into an ordinary episode of the show.

If it sets off a tsunami, it can always be repeated the next week with maximum coverage. But maybe it should be treated as what it is--ordinary human behavior.