Swish cheese: what year is it on Broadway, anyway? In a triple blast from the past, three new shows paint their gay characters a loud shade of lavender.

Flower Drum Song * Book by David Henry Hwang * Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein * Directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom * Starring Lea Salonga and Allen Liu * Virginia Theatre, New York City (open run)

Little Ham * Book by Dan Owens * Music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Woldin and Richard Engquist * Directed by Eric Riley * Starring Joe Wilson Jr. * John Houseman Theatre, New York City (open run)

A Man of No Importance * Book by Terrence McNally * Music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens * Directed by Joe Mantello * Starring Roger Rees and Faith Prince * Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, New York City (through December 29)

Period pieces always have as much to say about the time they're made or shown as the time they depict. Currently onstage in New York are a handful of new musicals depicting gay characters from the not-too-distant past. Little Ham, an off-Broadway musical adaptation of a play by Langston Hughes, takes place in 1936 Harlem. The Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song, with a new book by David Henry Hwang, is set in San Francisco's Chinatown circa 1960. And A Man of No Importance, the Lincoln Center Theater musical based on the 1994 movie that starred Albert Finney, unfolds in 1963 Dublin. The gay characters in Little Ham and Flower Drum Song are almost identical--swishy queens who design clothes for nightclub-singer divas-in-training--while the closeted central character of A Man of No Importance is a middle-aged theater-loving bus conductor who reads poems to his passengers and lives with his sister.

Gay men have always been good at playing the game of fluid identity, especially around gender roles. We can slap on a wig when duty calls, but that doesn't stop us from building a muscular carapace at the gym, and we know both are forms of drag. Stereotypes are based on truth, but they don't tell the whole picture. They freeze us into one image that's comforting and unthreatening to the dominant culture.

When such old-fashioned stereotypes of frivolous fairies and loveless bachelors persist even in the gay-gay-gay arena of stage musicals, what does that say about American culture, the theater, and gay life in 2002? Are they a way of measuring how far we've come since the 1930s or the 1960s? Or just the opposite--do they announce that despite Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, and Mark Bingham, we haven't come very far at all?

Flower Drum Song is the most shockingly retro of this trio. The revival was motivated by Hwang's desire to update the corny Orientalia of the original book. Hwang, who's best-known for M. Butterfly, has done a good job of cramming in just about as much nuanced detail about the journey of Chinese immigrants assimilating into American culture as a Broadway musical can handle. Yet he came up with the all-new character of Harvard (Allen Liu), a running fag joke who flaps his wrists, minces like Marilyn Monroe, and says "Fabulous!" The audience laughs at him, as they're supposed to. Well, if The Producers can get away with it, why not Flower Drum Song?

It's hard to get as hot and bothered about the stereotypical gay guy in Little Ham because the whole show is full of cardboard cartoon characters. Jimmy (Joe Wilson Jr.) is the flamboyantly dressed "couturier" who brandishes his Oriental fan like a weapon--he's the '30s Harlem equivalent of a snap queen. He's just one of a dozen stock types whom Langston Hughes (who was quietly gay himself) may have lovingly portrayed in prose but the musical's creators render lifelessly. It's painful to watch a bunch of potentially dynamic performers hobbled by a mediocre script and poor direction. Although nothing in the fairy-tale plot about Harlem residents uniting to kick the Mafia out of the neighborhood makes the slightest sense, it is worth noting that Jimmy seems completely accepted in this milieu. And the show drops hints that the white mobster's bodyguard might play on Jimmy's team--he secretly knits and takes unusual interest in a beautician's makeup kit.

It doesn't make much sense either that Alfie Byrne, the main character of A Man of No Importance (played by Roger Rees), idolizes Oscar Wilde, puts on his plays with an amateur company, and reads his poems aloud on the bus yet seems oblivious to Wilde's reputation as the foremost champion of "the love that dare not speak its name." But for middle-aged closet cases, denial is a survival strategy. The musical is not especially deep or probing, but it does honestly convey the constriction of the closet and the social pressure that enforces it.

I'm most haunted by the scene where Alfie summons the courage to go looking for love as a gay man, and the only way he knows how to announce himself is to part his hair in the middle, put on makeup, and wear a green carnation in his lapel--in other words, to go out in Oscar Wilde drag. This is the moment that had the most contemporary resonance for me. The desperate search for how to be gay, how to look gay, the notion that you have to distort who you are to be publicly gay--those impulses haven't disappeared with the advent of rainbow flags. Look at the pictures in any local gay publication and you'll mostly find muscle boys and drag queens--in other words, about as much range of choice as you see in these retro musicals. Is that who we are?

Shewey writes on theater for The New York Times.