Now, it appears, the 1980s macho "Magnum PI" idol, Tom Selleck, will indulge himself with a meandering, lengthy and humorous kiss with Kevin Kline in a film to be released September 19, titled IN & OUT.

The Times also tells its readers that Selleck doesn't mind playing a gay male; that he is, in fact, happy to play the part because, though he isn't the film's lead, his nevertheless interesting character is sure to be noticed and remembered.

Though the Times gives focus mostly to gay male parts, it does make mention of Ellen DeGeneres, explaining that television has, "with far less hoopla than films" introduced gay characters into everyday situations.

A principal reason today's actors are more willing to accept gay roles--in contrast to last decade's refusals-- is that scripts are now available that do not make stereotypes out of gay men and lesbians. Also, no one in Hollywood seems to be able to point to any actor's suffering financial setbacks as a result of having played someone gay.

But there are still some actors, according to director John Schlesinger, who fear gay roles and would still reject them outright. Schlesinger directed Sunday, Bloody Sunday, one of the first mainstream films to treat the presence of homosexuality in society seriously. "They're as frightened of their image today as they were in the old days. I don't think its necessarily changed at all."

Some diehard skeptics, upon hearing of "the new willingness," recalled the words of H.L. Mencken in an essay titled "The Cerebral Mime," a humorous screed satirizing actors. If an actor were to be paid or to garner applause for dancing naked to the music of Chopin, said Mencken, he would do it gladly, claiming all the while that his dance represented very essence of high art.

Cary Grant, recalls the Times writer Bernard Weinraub, kept his Cole Porter character indisputably heterosexual in a 1946 biography of the great song composer, Night & Day. Not only did Night & Day avoid all mention of Porter's being gay, but it "fabricated" a phony heterosexual life for him.

Rob Epstein, a producer of The Celluloid Closet, a history of homosexuality in the movies and narrated by Lily Tomlin, believes that Hollywood has marched behind the culture. Now, he says, its trying to "catch up." Based on a book by Vito Russo, whose film criticisms appeared regularly in the early 1970s in the original GAY, The Celluloid Closet, deemed by some to stand tallest among teaching aids, is now available in video.

Still, insists Epstein, Hollywood remains "woefully behind in the realistic representation of how gay people are living their lives at the end of the 20^th Century."