"Philadelphia," featuring a hero who was gay, and who had AIDS, touched a nerve in the movie going public, and became just such a hit.
Tom Hanks ascribes some of the film's success to the fact that "my screen persona is pretty much non-threatening... [so] this idea of a gay man with AIDS... doesn't have to be scary. You don't have to be threatened by this man's presence, [partly] because little Tommy Hanks is playing the role."
Jan Oxenberg points out that, as effective as the film was, it was still "a story about a gay hero who dies, who's a tragic figure. It remains to be seen whether Hollywood or the general public will embrace a film with a gay hero who lives."
"Philadelphia" screenwriter Ron Nyswaner responds, "We felt we would fail if our movie played to people who already ... believe that people shouldn't discriminate against homosexuals. If our movie only played to people who thought just like we do, we would have done nothing very significant."
As Hanks sees it, the message of the movie is that, gay or straight, "love is spelled with the same four letters."
A hundred years after those two men danced together in Edison's studio, fifty years after the Production Code made homosexuality a forbidden subject, gay characters of all stripes and colors can be found on the screen.
Some of these are from Hollywood, with varying degrees of boldness and honesty, but most of them are from low-budget independent filmmakers working outside the mainstream system.