watchin Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire in school. I was surprised to learn tennesse williams was openly gay and incorporated gay characters in his plays. were gay characters as accepted in movies then as they are now?
No. Gay characters in films were very, very rare before the 1970s, and not common until probably the 1990s. And when you did see them, up until the 1980s, they were nearly always caricatures, stereotypically femme guys or butch lesbians, and usually the butt of jokes. The first films in my memory that I can think of that dealt with a gay storyline in a positive way were "Willie and Phil", which was an early 1980s film about two guys in love with a girl who form an intimate relationship among the three of them, "Making Love", which was around the same time (+/- a few years), and "Philadelphia", which was probably early 90s. "Philadelphia" is considered by many people I know to be the first major Hollywood film to deal openly and positively with gay characters, with major actors. After that, many others followed. There's an excellent book on this topic, that I think was also a film, called "The Celluloid Closet" that traces the entire history of cinema and gay men. Now... while Hollywood was not making films portraying positive gay characters, Hollywood has always been, to my understanding, rather open and tolerant of gay men as actors, simply because... without them, there would not have been many actors While it was widely known within Hollywood that people like Rock Hudson were gay, it was also a carefully orchestrated cover-up; the studios always constructed sham girlfriends, and sometimes sham marriages, for their gay stars, believing (probably correctly) that the general public wouldn't accept them. And, of course, there was no TMZ.com and paparazzi to expose otherwise, and even the scandal sheets like National Enquirer were apparently "in on the plan" and chose not to reveal the information to the public prior to the 1980s. The revelation that Rock Hudson had AIDS and was dying from it in 1983 really, I think, triggered the beginning of a more open acknowledgment of gay actors in Hollywood, though the majority of gay actors -- at least those over 35 -- are still closeted.
Pre-code films would sometimes feature gay characters, up until about 1933 when the movie industry passed the Hays Code to avoid obscenity charges in an era of cultural puritanism. From the Hays Code to about the 1960s when it was thrown out, gay characters began to feature in films more frequently, although like Chip said, it was usually to the point of parody or served for humor. It's only been in my lifetime that gay characters were portrayed as "normal" people in film and television.
Even today there's some discrimination in Hollywood films, especially regarding the MPAA. There's this great documentary called "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" where they do this sequence comparing gay and straight sex scenes that are almost exactly the same, shot for shot. Every time, the gay scene is rated NC-17 while the straight scene is rated R. Unfortunately, the sequence isn't on youtube, but the whole movie is on Netflix Instant and I highly recommend it.
