A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Child accused in "Practice" finale; Biscuit gets a date on "Ally" Sound Salvation By Sarah Vowell I Want My Camp TV Y E S T E R D A Y Not Wilde enough Two new portraits of Oscar Wilde miss the wickedness of his style The Judas Kiss Liam Neeson hangs fire as Oscar Wilde in David Hare's new play Woo Jada Pinkett Smith stars in this sexy, sunny comedy R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Deep Impact By Charles Taylor Sapocalypse now! The end of the world as Hallmark moment (05/07/98) Stephen Fry By Cynthia Joyce The importance of being Wilde (05/07/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Why "Rio Bravo" is the Great American Movie (05/05/98) He Got Game Reviewed by Gary Kamiya Spike Lee's soft-hearted but moving tribute to faith, love and basketball (05/01/98) Les Miserables A high-minded film version of Victor Hugo's epic tale of crime and obsession (05/01/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

_________________When it comes to what goes on _________________between gay men and straight women, _________________Hollywood is still in the dark. BY DANIEL MENDELSOHN | 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. N E X T_P A G E _| Jennifer Aniston, fag hag?