When was I first aware that a movie character was intended to behomosexual? It must have been in the early 1960s, in the final sequence ofFellini's ``La Dolce Vita,'' when two transvestites join the sad group that goesto meet the dawn. What ``The Celluloid Closet'' makes clear is that I had seenlots of gay characters before then--it's just that the movies never quiteidentified them as gay, or, like a lot of moviegoers, I didn't pick up on theclues. I remember that Peter Ustinov, playing Nero in ``Quo Vadis'' (1951),struck me oddly in a scene where he collected his tears in a tiny crystalgoblet, but maybe I thought that was typical of Roman emperors.

Portrayals of homosexuality were frowned upon until the 1960s, bythe movie industry's production code and such groups as the Legion of Decency.

Yet gays were everywhere in the movies, right from the beginning--thisdocumentary shows two men dancing together in a Thomas Edison short named ``TheGay Brothers,'' from 1895--and often they were hidden in plain view. Hollywoodknew who was gay and who was not, and there were in-jokes like John Ireland'sline to Montgomery Clift in ``Red River'': ``There are only two things morebeautiful than a good gun--a Swiss watch, or a woman from anywhere. You ever hada Swiss watch?'' ``The Celluloid Closet'' is inspired by a 1981 book by Vito Russo,who wrote as a gay man who found he had to look in the shadows and subtexts ofmovies to find the homosexual characters who were surely there. His book was acompendium of visible and concealed gays in the movies, and now thisdocumentary, which shows the scenes he could only describe, makes it clearHollywood wanted it both ways: It benefitted from the richness that gays addedto films, but didn't want to acknowledge their sexuality. In those few filmsthat were frankly about gays, their lives almost always ended in madness ordeath (there is a montage of gays dying onscreen, of which my favorite from aFreudian point of view is Sandy Dennis as a lesbian in ``The Fox,'' crushed by afalling tree).

The movie, narrated by Lily Tomlin, contains interviews with a lotof witnesses from the days when gays were in the Hollywood closet. The chat withGore Vidal has already become famous. He recalls how he was hired by directorWilliam Wyler to do rewrites on ``Ben-Hur.'' One of the film's problems was thatthere was no plausible explanation for the hatred between the characters playedby Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd. Vidal's suggestion: They were lovers whenthey were teenagers, but now Ben-Hur (Heston) denies that time, and Boyd isresentful. Wyler agreed that would provide the motivation for a key scene, butdecided to tell only Boyd, not Heston, who ``wouldn't be able to handle it.''The film shows the scene, which plays with an amusing subtext.

Sometimes directors deleted scenes with gay themes because ofstudio or censorship pressure. Tony Curtis is droll as he recalls a scene withLaurence Olivier in Stanley Kubrick's ``Spartacus,'' where the two men flirtedin a hot bath. (The scene was restored when the movie was re-released in 1991.) Is it because we know stars were gay that their scenes playdifferently this time around? There's a scene from ``Pillow Talk'' in which RockHudson plays a straight man pretending to be gay in order to avoid anentanglement with Doris Day. Does Hudson seem privately amused by the twist? Itlooks that way (and Mark Rappaport's ``Rock Hudson's Home Movies'' finds scenesall through Hudson's career where he seems aware of additional levels ofpossibilities).

``The Celluloid Closet'' was directed by Rob Epstein and JeffreyFriedman, who won Oscars for their two previous gay-themed docs, ``The Life ofHarvey Milk'' and ``Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt''; their track recordencourages their interview subjects to open up. Playwright and actor HarveyFierstein recalls that when he was young he always liked the ``sissies'' in themovies, and Tomlin, narrating a montage that shows how very many sissies therewere (from Peter Lorre to Anthony Perkins), says sissies made the othercharacters seem ``more manly or more womanly, by filling the space in between.'' ``The Celluloid Closet'' surveys movies from the earliest times tothe present, showing characters who were gay even though the movies pretendednot to know (Marlene Dietrich in trousers in the 1930 film ``Morocco,'' forexample, or a musical number named ``Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?'' in1953's ``Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,'' in which Jane Russell dances smolderinglythrough a gym where the body-builders studiously ignore her). It gives full dueto the ground-breaking 1970 movie ``The Boys in the Band'' and such recent filmsas ``Philadelphia.'' I learn from Brandon Judell, a film critic on the Internet, that thefilmmakers weren't able to include one planned sequence because of legalobjections. They wanted to show scenes from biopics that turned gays intostraights, but couldn't get the rights. Richard Burton's estate refused therights to show scenes from ``Alexander the Great.'' Goldwyn wouldn't licenseclips from ``Hans Christian Andersen'' (Epstein says ``somehow they got the ideawe were outing Danny Kaye as opposed to Hans Christian Andersen''). Lawyersstepped in at the possibility that the film would identify Cole Porter ashomosexual (!). And Charlton Heston refused permission to use scenes from ``TheAgony and the Ecstasy'' (``because he'd done a lot of research for his role andhe assured us that Michelangelo was not homosexual''). And I suppose Ben-Hurwasn't, either.