Can men and women have relationships without also having sex? It's a question we've been pondering ever since courtly love went the way of the dodo, and the answer, at least in 20th century popular culture, has been a resounding "No." In movies, it's been pretty clear that guy + girl = romance ever since Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert -- unlikely roommates on a madcap road trip in Frank Capra's 1934 classic "It Happened One Night" -- started out chastely separated by a partition made of sheets, only to end up in each others' arms. (More recently, there was "When Harry Met Sally ..." in which not only Meg Ryan's orgasm but also the film's commitment to exploring the uncharted waters of nonsexual relationships between guys and girls turned out to be faked: Of course they ended up together.) In television series, it's true that some famous pairings between attractive men and women have gone unconsummated for a long time. But this imposed celibacy (which almost always leads to wedding bells, or at least a night of bliss) owes less to a desire to explore the phenomenon of just-good-friendships than it does to something far more practical. Sexual tension generated plots and maintained audience interest for everything from "Get Smart!" to "Moonlighting" and "The X-Files." (When the male and female leads finally do get down to business, ratings tend to go down, too.) Perhaps in response to the inevitability of sex on the big and small screens, on records and CDs, in your face and in your ear, a mini-spate of recent movies has discovered a built-in obstacle that even Viagra can't cure. In last year's "My Best Friend's Wedding" and, even more explicitly, last month's "The Object of My Affection," the male half of the leading couple has been gay. (In the 1997 film "In and Out," neither the guy nor the girl realized he was gay, but oh well.) Straight women and gay men have been forming fast friendships for years: Both, after all, are faced with the annoying dilemma of just what to do about men. (Or with them: A 1997 book is called "Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man.") Hollywood's recent interest in these straight girl-gay guy pairings suggests, at least superficially, that despite our cultural obsession with sex, and "relationships," many of us dream secretly of an erotic demilitarized zone in which we can just relate. What's frustrating is that these three films don't do their potentially interesting subject real justice. Each, in its own way, avoids the issue, as if sexless male-female friendships were something terribly dirty, something we have to avert our eyes from. Perhaps that's because all three of these movies are crypto-fag hag stories -- films about a special subset of straight girl-gay guy friendships, those well-documented (if only informally) relationships between gay men and women who, for whatever reasons -- some subconscious anxiety about male sexuality, presumably -- prefer to be around men who aren't interested in them as sexual objects. The cliché about fag hags is that they're overweight or unattractive in some other obvious way that betrays their subconscious desire to avoid sex with men. But a movie about a fat girl who prefers the company of gay men, however psychologically on-target, would be doomed from the start in Hollywood, which is even more nervous about unattractive female leads than it is about sex. As a result, each of these movies has made its heroine a svelte beauty. "My Best Friend's Wedding" asks its audience to believe that Julia Roberts' character was having such a hard time getting laid that she spent all her forlorn free hours hanging out with her gay pal, played by a just-as-improbably desexualized Rupert Everett. But why is Julia spending so much time with Rupert? Yes, he's outré and sardonic and tries on funny hats in stores -- everything we've come to expect from gay best friends in films -- but the picture fumbles its opportunity to investigate the deeper currents in the friendships between straight girls and gay guys, why it's Rupert and not the straight-arrow leading man, Dermot Mulroney, who's obviously Julia's real best friend. It would have been fun to see them bonding in some grittier or more revealing way, and not just comparing blow job techniques, say, or reading to each other from "Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man." What is it like when men and women meet and connect emotionally in a territory free from the land mines of sex and romance? "My Best Friend's Wedding" is never going to show us that.

"In And Out" circles around the straight girl-gay guy friendship thing even more frenetically, by making its hero, Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline), totally unaware of his homosexuality until halfway through the movie. Howard's fiancée, Emily, played by the adorable (and still underused) Joan Cusack, didn't mind not getting any sex during her three-year betrothal because Howard was "smarter, more sensitive, more interesting" than all the other guys, and because he taught her about "art, life and magic." (Huh? She didn't know he was gay?) When you learn that Emily used to be 75 pounds heavier, you get a tiny whiff of the other, more interesting movie that's buried here -- the one about fey, gay Howard the English teacher and his intense friendship with his fat-but-pretty colleague Emily, a movie about the things that men and women may want from each other (art, life, magic?) when sex isn't an issue. But even with a funny gay screenwriter like Paul Rudnick, this is Hollywood, and the real movie here, the fag-hag movie, gets buried under "In and Out" just as surely as the real, fat, fag hag Emily remains buried underneath the cute, slim Joan Cusack. But the most frustrating of these three movies, the one that raises the most interesting interpersonal issues and then refuses to really deal with them, is Nicholas Hytner's "The Object of My Affection," from a Wendy Wasserstein script based on the 1988 novel by Stephen McCauley. "Object" keeps promising that it's going to break out of the old Hollywood mold and find out what happens when the cute girl, Nina Borowksi (Jennifer Aniston), and the cute guy, George Hanson (Paul Rudd), are never going to be more than Just Good Friends. But, although the movie's characters may have their theories about the psychological core of the straight girl-gay guy relationship ("You're not a threat to her, right? -- that's the attraction," Nina's boorish boyfriend, Vince, patronizingly asks George), its screenwriter doesn't seem to get it. Soon after Nina and George meet, the telltale signs appear: They giggle with adorable, photogenic self-consciousness while taking tango lessons; they go on rides at amusement parks while breathlessly exposing their flawless teeth; and they have serious talks at night while eating expensive ice cream. In the movies, this is shorthand for Budding Romance. It's not long before Nina's smashing dishes into the sink when George goes off with another ... man. McCauley's book -- which, like its non-comic counterpart, Michael Cunningham's lyrical 1990 novel "A Home at the End of the World," came out at a time when the tantalizing new possibility of a post-nuclear, gay-straight family hadn't yet ossified into Benneton-ad cliché -- focused on complex people in unconventional situations. (After Nina gets pregnant by Vince, George agrees to stand in as the child's father.) But even though the movie pays lip service to the book's interest in new kinds of relationships between independent-minded people -- "We can make this up for ourselves," George says in the movie -- Wasserstein's adaptation, which makes Nina the heroine, bizarrely refashions the story, willfully re-sexualizing the dynamic by having Nina fall for George. The Wasserstein "Object of My Affection" is, unsurprisingly perhaps, all about a cute, funny Jewish girl whom most guys are too clueless to appreciate. The provocative and elaborate questions raised by the gay boy-straight girl coupling in the book end up as moot points. This "Object" becomes just another Feminist Lite single mom comedy, in which Mom finds herself standing alone when the boys run off to play or get laid -- in short, just another movie about guys' inability to commit. "I want Paul," George responds to a besotted and increasingly bitchy Nina's impatient "What do you want?" He tears up guiltily as if he, rather than she, was demanding something emotionally unreasonable. Wasserstein just can't imagine the new kind of emotional world McCauley's book tried, however breezily, to envision. That's most obvious in the movie's climactic confrontation between George and Nina, which takes place at the lavish wedding of George's serially affianced and crudely womanizing brother, Frank (Steve Zahn). Painfully aware of her desire for George, overwhelmed by sexual frustration and hugely, uncomfortably pregnant (men!), Nina waddles away from her table into a deserted room; a solicitous George follows. "Look at this," she says, gesticulating angrily at the wedding, the fancy-shmancy guests, the food, the band, the Manhattan skyline in the distance. "This is real. We're not real." Why not? Because George and Nina haven't registered at Bloomies? Because their relationship won't culminate in a $100-a-person catered affair and Aunt Ida dancing the hora in a walker? If George and Nina's dream of gay-straight co-parenting isn't "real," that's simply because Wasserstein has made it unreal. She's stacked the dramatic deck. I'll come clean here: I'm helping a straight single woman raise a child -- admittedly sans roller coasters, sans tango lessons, but also sans broken dishes in the sink. A lot of other gay men are, too. Any time Wasserstein wants to see what "real" looks like, she's welcome to join us for our nightly 7 p.m. rendezvous with the potty (bring rubber gloves). Whatever its pretensions to exploring new emotional and social territory, this version of "Object of My Affection" just keeps backsliding into an entirely conventional, nice-Jewish-girl, Upper West Side fantasy of what life's supposed to be like. (You could say the same for the way Wasserstein fobs the lovelorn Nina off on the black cop who rescues her from a purse-snatching: Once again, the schwartzers are left to clean up the mess.) Earlier in the movie, at the point when Nina has her final argument with the horrible Vince and tells him to get lost, there's a moment when Vince gets belligerent with George, who has sprung to Nina's defense. George draws closer to Nina; Vince looks from one to the other and realizes he's been replaced. Finally, Vince snaps. "You homo!" he snarls, two inches from George's face, and things look like they're going to get physical until Nina breaks it up. The scene bugged me at the time, and I couldn't think why; it wasn't until much later that I realized what was wrong with this picture. When straight guys get pissed off at gay men, they don't say "homo" -- they say faggot. (There's something more satisfying about the consonants.) Wasserstein's inability to bring herself to use the N-word of gay culture is a kind of symbol. It's a symbol for this movie's failure of will. Despite its liberal trappings, "Object of My Affections," like other Hollywood movies about gay men and straight women, takes the conservative way out; it prefers looking nice to being real.