He may have a tough guy image, but Dennis Quaid had no qualms about playing gay on screen. But, as Steve Pratt reports, it wasn't always this way for the stars of the past.

THIS was the kissing scene that Michael Caine was dreading. Usually, locking lips with a co-star didn't bother him. But this time he had to snog a man, Superman star Christopher Reeve. "That was the tightest lip kiss in the history of cinema," the 70-year-old British actor recalls in BBC1's Hollywood Greats series next week.

"That was very difficult. We drank a bottle of brandy between us working up to it, and got so pissed we couldn't remember our lines." Caine and Reeve had just a single kiss in the thriller Deathtrap. The brevity of the lip lock didn't make it any easier, although alcohol did.

American actors James Van Der Beek, clean-cut star of TV's Dawson's Creek, and Ian Somerhalder needed a beer before kissing in a fantasy sequence in forthcoming drama Rules Of Attraction. "It's not that I dreaded the scene, but it was in the middle of the schedule so I didn't have to think about it until then," says Van Der Beek.

"I thought it was quite subversive and, because you like a moment like that, you gear up for it and kind of get through it. It was fun. By the time it was over, I'd realised it wasn't a big deal at all."

Actors normally game for anything on the big screen - dangerous stunts, raunchy sex scenes, glamorous locations - suddenly become shy when required to pucker up for a same-sex kiss. Some aren't persuaded that a kiss is just a kiss, or that playing a gay character is something they should do. This legacy stems from a reluctance in Hollywood not only to come out of the closet in real life but also play a homosexual on screen for fear people think the performance is too convincing and jump to the wrong conclusion. It's almost as if a straight actor playing a gay man feels the need to turn to the camera and tell the audience: "I'm only acting."

A pat on the back then for Dennis Quaid, one of the few actors willing to go against his usual image. In the 1950s-style melodrama Far From Heaven, he plays a married-with-children husband forced out of the closet after being seen frequenting all-male drinking clubs. He's seen kissing a male lover, something cinemagoers don't expect from an actor who, to quote the publicity, "throughout his career has so effortlessly embodied comfortable masculinity on-screen".

Quaid knew a good career-reviving role when he saw it. One which would get him noticed. This followed the very public break-up of his marriage to Meg Ryan after her relationship with Russell Crowe, another tough guy who played a gay man in the 1994 film The Sum Of Us.

Quaid approached the kiss as he would if the recipient was a woman. "It's all about being a human being, it's all about love," he says. "Like any love scene, the hardest part was just waiting around to do it. And once you've done the scene three or four times, hey, it's all in a day's work." For the first time probably, Quaid received kissing advice, from director Todd Haynes. "He started in a more muscular kid of way. I said that it needed to be more simple - romantic and tender," says Haynes.

The continued reluctance of big name actors to play gay men means that when one of them does, it's still worthy of mention. In Hollywood's heyday, with so many on both sides of the camera hiding their homosexuality, it was highly unlikely actors would agree to play gay on screen. The difference then was that while their sexual preferences were an open secret within the industry, the public was kept in the dark. These days, tabloid reporting and scandal sheets mean that being outed is more likely to happen.

Ironically, Far From Heaven is a carbon copy of the type of drama that often starred Rock Hudson. He made a career out of playing the romantic leading man opposite actresses such as Jane Wyman and Doris Day.

The studio publicity machine ensured no mention was made of his homosexuality. He even got married and, the story goes, the studio "sacrificed" another gay actor to a magazine in exchange for the publication not outing Hudson. The fact that Hudson was so successful in playing a convincing heterosexual all his career is testimony to his skill as an actor.

If today's actors are still unwilling to admit their sexuality, more straight ones are ready to portray homosexuals. Ten years ago Tom Hanks gambled by agreeing to play an AIDS-suffering gay man in Philadelphia, Hollywood's first mainstream drama about the illness.

He had no worries about playing a homosexual. "It was not a big risk, a bold move. The audience is incredibly hip and will follow you anywhere if you tell them it's going to be all right," he told me at the time. "There is an old school kind of sensibility that still rationalises there is some sort of stigma playing a homosexual, but I think that passed in the audience some time ago."

The film was criticised over the lack of physical contact between the Hanks character and his lover, and for putting a Hollywood gloss on the story. Inevitably, some wondered why a gay actor wasn't playing a gay character. Hanks could have pointed out that an actor doesn't have to have killed someone to play a murderer, but instead asked: "Tell me an openly gay star who can open a movie like I do". Nobody could, of course, and the same still applies today.

Dirk Bogarde risked considerably more than Hanks by playing a gay barrister 30 years before in the ground-breaking British film Victim. He had something to gain, as he was desperate to prove himself a versatile actor and escape the British heart-throb tag. More recently, Hugh Grant and James Wilby played lovers in the film of E M Forster's Maurice. But TV more than film has been willing to portray gay relationships in series such as Queer As Folk and Six Feet Under.

Victim was notable as one of the first films to show homosexuals as flesh-and-blood characters rather than limp-wristed, mincing, screaming queens. Gays have always existed in movies on both sides of the Atlantic, but as stereotypes considered unthreatening and comic.

Audiences approved of a pair of rampantly heterosexual actors, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton, as camp hairdressers and housemates in Staircase in 1969 because it seemed a bit of fun.

BISEXUAL was more acceptable too. The shock value of the kiss between Peter Finch and his male lover in Sunday Bloody Sunday two years later was lessened by having the same lover share sex scenes with a woman (Glenda Jackson).

Three decades later, we appear not to have progressed that much when Dennis Quaid kissing a man still arouses such attention, just as two policemen kissing on a pre-watershed episode of ITV's The Bill provoked dozens of complaints. These days, at least, Hollywood has more of a sense of humour about the subject. Witness In And Out, a 1997 comedy inspired by Hanks's Oscar speech during which he outed his old school professor while collecting his best actor award for Philadelphia. The plot of In And Out had Kevin Kline as a small town teacher about to be married who's outed by an ex-pupil during a televised awards acceptance speech.

There was even a scene in which the teacher kisses another man, a gay reporter played by Tom Selleck, star of TV's Magnum series. There is no record whether alcohol was involved in getting the kiss on celluloid.

*Far From Heaven (12A) is showing in cinemas now. Rules Of Attraction (18) opens on March 28.