Focus on gay stereotypes

Scene - Laurel and Hardy are sitting on a bed. Hardy: 'She thinks I think more of you than I do of her.' Laurel: 'But you do don't you?' Hardy: 'We won't go into that [slight limping of the wrist].' In a century of cinema, Hollywood has had a tremendous effect on our images of ourselves. Directors have shown us how to dream, kiss, have romantic moments, and what we should aspire to. And yet, although the first 'gay' image dates from 1895 - an experimental film short by Thomas Edison showing two men dancing in each other's arms as another plays the violin - there have been few sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality. Plenty of sissies with floppy wrists, a few psychopaths, blackmail victims, some gay transvestites in bars: gay people have largely been something to laugh at, or later to pity or, even more recently, to fear.

As writer Armistead Maupin observes, for years he watched movies where the gay characters had to die in the end - Calamity Jane, Dirk Bogarde's character in Victim (1961) - and, while he was making the decision to 'come out', he had this feeling from the films he saw: 'That I would start something that I couldn't turn back, and that the end of it would be suicide.' In this intelligent, touching documentary, based on the work of activist and film lover Vito Russo, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have taken a look at more than 100 films, together with interviews with many of the filmmakers and actors who created them, to show how public thinking about gay people has changed.

The production code, which ruled the content of American movies for decades, meant that Hollywood had to create movies between the lines.

In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, there is a scene where Jane Russell is doing a musical number in a ship gymnasium, surrounded by men in tight beige shorts exercising in synchronisation. As the narrator points out, here is a gym absolutely full of male body builders who have no interest in the single, beautiful woman in their midst.

There are also some surprisingly explicit scenes: in Rebecca (1940) there is a moving moment when the dour Mrs Danvers is showing the room where she has carefully preserved the clothes of the woman she was so clearly in love with. She brushes Rebecca's fur coat very sensually: she has even kept all her underwear.

This is not a minority interest film: as a depiction of how Western consciousness has been manipulated by the movies it is an important one.