Armistead Maupin recalls "Cabaret" as "the first film that really celebrated homosexuality... For me it embodied the very life I was beginning to live in San Francisco, one in which there was no onus placed on homosexuality."
"The boy was homosexual," explains Jay Presson Allen, who wrote the screenplay for the film, "and it just seemed rational, it seemed reasonable... that's what the story was. There was no fuss with anybody, none at all. So things change more quickly than you might imagine."
Gay male supporting characters began appearing more and more, and the characters often had a depth and self-awareness that was new for the movies (they also often had the best lines).
African American actor Antonio Fargas played two such roles in the mid-seventies: in "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" he played a queen called Bernstein, one of a group of Bohemian friends living in Greenwich Village in the fifties; and that same year, he played a queen called Lindy, part of the ensemble that works at the "Car Wash".
"I think it was easier for the powers that be to show a black as a homosexual rather than a white character as a homosexual," says Fargas. He likens it to the tendency to present the black experience in comedies and sitcoms rather than in dramas.
But as gays (or at least gay men) became more visible, they also became easier targets. In movie after movie, gay male characters were ridiculed, taunted, scape-goated, beat up, or killed.
Tom Hanks remembers the absurdly queeny hitch-hikers in "Vanishing Point" as "the first image that I remember... about anybody being gay in a motion picture that I saw."
He vividly recalls the stereotypical characterizations of the gay characters, as well as the glee with which he and his high school buddies greeted the moment when "those two homos" received their come uppance.
"Philadelphia" screenwriter Ron Nyswaner recalls similar experiences, but from a gay perspective. He recalls seeing "Freebie and the Bean" with a group of friends, and being appalled by the audience's enthusiastic reaction to the brutal killing of a murderous drag queen. "People were applauding the death of the villain -- but they were also applauding the death of a homosexual."
"You know you're watching a heterosexual movie," says Richard Dyer. "You know that's the deal when you pay to see a Hollywood movie. But somehow, you're still not quite ready to be insulted."
Barry Sandler points out the astonishing number of movies in which the word "faggot" is casually used -- and argues that the word "nigger" would never be used that indiscriminately.