Hollywood’s leading stars used to run a mile if they were offered the role of ahomosexual, but now it pays to be gay, writes Declan Cashin

In the new movie Milk, Sean Penn plays America's first openly gay politician Harvey Milk, who was shot dead in San Francisco City Hall 30 years ago. The 48-year-old immerses himself completely in the role, enjoying a steamy French kiss with his co-star, James Franco.

The movie received its premiere in the US last week, and now Penn, who won an Oscar in 2003 for Mystic River, has been firmly installed as the favourite to win a second statue next year for the role.

Up until very recently, heterosexual Hollywood stars ran a proverbial mile from any gay roles for fear of how it would impact on their careers.

That all changed when Tinseltown's Everyman Tom Hanks won an Oscar for playing a gay man dying of Aids in Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993).

Since then, Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), and Felicity Huffman (Transamerica) have all won plaudits and acting gongs for playing gay characters, but it was Brokeback Mountain stars Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger who conclusively proved that "going gay for pay" is the savviest, most rewarding career move an actor can make in Hollywood today (though it's still another matter entirely for actual gay actors who want to come out of the closet and not have it affect their careers).

This mini-flourishing of gay screen roles is a development that has been a long time coming in mainstream Hollywood cinema, where homosexuality was, at best, only ever hinted at, and, at worst, either sidelined or actively ignored.

The groundbreaking book and documentary on the topic, The Celluloid Closet, noted that when homosexuality did make a rare appearance throughout the history of cinema, it was depicted as something to laugh at, something to pity, or even something to fear.

One of the first movies ever made by the Edison studio was entitled The Gay Brothers (1895), though it's assumed that the word was used in the traditional rather than the modern sense.

Nevertheless, it did feature a short comic sequence where two men waltzed with one another.

As cinema grew as a popular art form, gay audiences could only look for coded representations of homosexuality in mainstream productions, reading between the lines for clues and any glaring innuendo.

The biggest hint was normally cross-dressing and choosing male costumes for female stars, such as Katharine Hepburn (in the 1935 movie Sylvia Scarlett) and Marlene Dietrich, who also shared a kiss on the lips with another woman in Morocco (1930).

Dietrich was later revealed to be bisexual, as was her contemporary Greta Garbo, who had great fun playing off her sexual ambiguity in the title role in Queen Christina (1933). In the movie, Garbo's Christina wears men's clothes, avoids male suitors and greets a countess with a passionate kiss. At one point, the character even declares that she "will die a bachelor!"

Such playful hinting was soon stamped out by the widescale enforcement of the censorious Hayes Code in 1934, which branded homosexuality on screen as a "sex perversion" that was to be banned along with -- amongst other topics -- nudity, seduction, steamy embraces and prostitution.

For almost 30 years afterwards, characters of homosexual or ambiguous orientation were forced even further underground, only popping up on screens as villains (like in 1948's The Snake Pit and in Hitchcock's Rope), sad objects of pity, as evoked by Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause (co-starring the bisexual James Dean).

One of the most famous examples of censorship during the period was the cutting of a heavily-suggestive bathing scene (that was later restored) featuring Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Spartacus (1960), while the homosexual undertones in the movie adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays, such as Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, starring the late Paul Newman, were suppressed entirely -- with the exception of 1959's Suddenly, Last Summer, in which they were depicted as sinister sexual predators.

The Hayes Code began to lose its authority at the start of the 1960s, but film-makers could still only depict alternative sexuality as something sad and pitiful, and gay people as victims rather than agents or heroes.

Dirk Bogarde, the biggest box office star in Britain at the time (who was also tagged with gay rumours throughout his life), took a massive career risk by starring in Victim (1961), playing a gay solicitor who fights back against a blackmail plot, before committing suicide.

Bogarde was highly praised for the move, and his career continued at a prolific pace until he retired from the screen to concentrate on writing in the 1970s.

Throughout the 1960s, in movies like The Killing of Sister George and Reflections on A Golden Eye, villainy, victimhood and suffering remained the defining characteristics of gay roles on screen.

However, amidst the Stonewall riots and the emerging gay liberation movement, things improved with more sensitive depictions of gay-themed friendships and relationships in movies like Midnight Cowboy (the first X-rated movie to win the Best Picture Oscar) and The Boys in The Band (1970).

Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) starred legendary hellraiser and ladies man Peter Finch as a doctor in love with a young art student (Murray Head), resulting in a famous kiss that provoked shock, jeers and even walkouts at the time. When later asked how it felt to kiss another man, Finch uttered the famous reply: "I closed my eyes and thought of England".

In terms of gay cinema, the 1980s got off to a nasty start with the thriller Cruising, starring Al Pacino as an undercover cop hunting a serial killer in the gay subculture, which was met with fierce opposition from gay commentators who condemned what they saw as the links between violence and gay sex.

Be that as it may, as the '80s progressed, more actors appeared willing to "play gay" in a number of high-profile movies. Daniel Day-Lewis made his first major impression on audiences playing a gay man having an inter-racial affair with his business partner in My Beautiful Laundrette (1986), set pointedly in Thatcher's less-than-tolerant Britain.

Lesbian relationships were also notable features of Steven Spielberg's The Colour Purple, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Margaret Avery; Personal Best, with Mariel Hemingway; and The Hunger, which featured a sizzling love scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

As the '90s dawned, both Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe and the iconic Thelma and Louise revolved heavily around semi-gay friendships between female characters, but it wasn't until Tom Hanks starred in Philadelphia that "Hollywood's Gay 90s" really kicked off.

Within a few years, gay characters featured prominently in major releases like In and Out, The Object of My Affection, As Good as It Gets and My Best Friend's Wedding, which made a star of Rupert Everett, one of Hollywood's few openly gay leading men.

Indeed, Everett's breakout success from that movie was so immense that he was widely tipped to be nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar at the 1997 awards.

However, the British star was snubbed, while Greg Kinnear, a straight actor playing a gay character in As Good as It Gets, unexpectedly made the final five.

From today's vantage point, that might just have been the most telling moment yet in modern Hollywood's ever- curious approach to homosexuality on the silver screen.