Summer Movie Doldrums: Where Have All the Gay Cowboys Gone?

While this is of course a disappointment to us and to other filmgoers who are tired of the same old formulas on screen, it's nothing new. Back in 1996 when The First Wives Club blew away box office expectations despite being a film carried by four middle-aged women, it seemed a sign that there was an audience out there for this kind of movie and that more films aimed at it would follow fast and furious. This of course didn't happen — or at least not right away. (In recent years one of those first wives, Diane Keaton, has made a second career out of romance movies for women of a certain age).

Likewise, the curious dead space that followed the smash success of the audacious 2001 movie musical Moulin Rouge! Surely if this off-the-wall song-and-dance smash could be such a hit, the studios would be clamoring to put more musicals out there. But even after Chicago made a huge splash and walked away with a half-dozen Oscars a year later, things dried up. It was three years before the next musical, The Producers, made it to screen, followed by Dreamgirls and Hairspray.

Despite the fact that musicals were the foundation upon which much of the American film industry was built, even they aren't a "sure thing" anymore, and getting them to the screen is hard even when they're based on tried-and-true material (aside from Rouge!, which was itself cobbled from mainstream pop songs, all of the subsequent musical movies stemmed from hugely successful stage productions). So just imagine how much harder of a sell an out-of-thin-air gay love story would be.

If the slow-to-start trends that these other breakout novelty films sparked are any indication, then we still may see more gay mainstream fare coming our way. Rome wasn't built in a day, after all.

But it's troubling that there are a few notable gay film projects that are still stuck in the development limbo that they've been in for a number of years now — development one might think would have been accelerated by Brokeback's breakout success. Two such projects, The Dreyfus Affair and The Front Runner (both based on popular novels and both set in the world of sports, which has itself seen a pop in gay visibility this year), would seem likely candidates to be greenlighted due to their fan bases and strong narratives.

But recent queries of the films' respective production companies and information provided on IMDb.com reveal that these ships have not been affected by any sort of rising tide in widescreen gay acceptance. In other words, we're likely to see Brokeback 2: Electric Cowboy Boogaloo before either of these hits screens.

(It's interesting to note that there is one gay movie based on a book that is actually going to make it to the big screen — at least in Canada. It's Breakfast With Scot starring Tom Cavanagh as a gay hockey player. This is an entirely Canadian production currently scheduled for a December release, though not in the U.S.)

It's clear that Hollywood isn't yet ready to place gay characters front and center. But what about supporting characters? Why have they dried up as well?

It's possible that the moderate mainstream success of Brokeback sent a message that gay characters are no longer controversial or "sexy" enough to cause a splash in and of themselves. While Brokeback had its share of controversy leading up to its release, the mainstream acceptance of the film — which even won an MTV Movie Award for "Best Kiss" — defused much of its headline appeal.

And considering that when gay characters pop up in ensemble films it's usually to shock or surprise, this acceptance basically renders them sterile. After all, if gay weren't controversial or a source of some discomfort for the core audience, the gay "villain" of Talladega Nights would never have been gay, because it would have served no narrative purpose. Interestingly, this film's climactic gay kiss is up for an award this year as well — a clue that audiences got the joke and aren't likely to fall for it again. Are gay supporting characters becoming a "been there, done that" cliché?

But even that wouldn't explain the dearth of gay movies both in limited release and on the festival circuit. True, the straight fests might not be programming as many gay movies, but what if as many gay movies aren't being made in the first place?

Over the past several years, gay visibility in the news and on television — reality television and cable, mostly — has gone through the roof. Gay men and women are able to flip on their sets and watch gay people on Project Runway, Survivor, Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters and in anything on several gay channels. That begs the question: Could the increased availability of gay images and characters be lulling gay artists, who would otherwise have an itch to get their stories on screens, into a sense of complacency?