Oklahomo! Oklahomosexuality

Barbra Streisand's screen début Funny Girl is less film than an act of worship. The post- Dr Zhivago Omar Sharif starred opposite her, but hardly anyone noticed because there's barely a moment in the 155-minute picture when the camera isn't gazing at Streisand in something close to astonishment. In 1968, producer Ray Stark and veteran director William Wyler knew that they were unleashing an incendiary property onto the collective retinas of the cinema-going public and used every imaginable technique to flatter, support and sustain their solid gold investment.

Barbra Streisand's screen début Funny Girl is less film than an act of worship. The post- Dr Zhivago Omar Sharif starred opposite her, but hardly anyone noticed because there's barely a moment in the 155-minute picture when the camera isn't gazing at Streisand in something close to astonishment. In 1968, producer Ray Stark and veteran director William Wyler knew that they were unleashing an incendiary property onto the collective retinas of the cinema-going public and used every imaginable technique to flatter, support and sustain their solid gold investment.

Take the opening. A pre-Scorsese uninterrupted tracking shot follows her from behind as she walks to the theatre, steps inside the stage door and pulls up in front of a full-length mirror, finally revealing her face to us. She stares at herself and breathes aloud: "Hello, gorgeous."

Thirty years later, Streisand directed, produced and starred in My Poster Has Eight Name Checks, sorry, The Mirror Has Two Faces, a movie in which she spent two hours begging everyone to say exactly the same line, a thematic career span which makes Sylvester Stallone look versatile.

I wasn't always so mean about Barbra. At a dangerously impressionable age - about 11 - I saw Funny Girl at the now defunct Waldorf Cinema in Basingstoke with my friend Liz. It was a momentous occasion. During that film I underwent my heterosexual phase. Feeling it was expected of me, I put my arm around her. Sadly, close questioning has revealed that although she remembers seeing the film together, my advances are forgotten. None the less, this occasion marked the onset of the first stage of my psychosexual development: my real object of desire was, of course, Barbra. I was in the state of Oklahomosexuality.

The moment sound arrived in the movies, studios began making musicals. And from that moment on, lesbians and gays have been singing the songs and dreaming. I realise now that I didn't just want to watch Barbra; on some level I wanted to be her. The physical manifestation of this pre-gay stage consisted of dancing around the living room miming to records and dreaming of a career (preferably hers) in musicals. It is risky to generalise, but I know I was not alone in this. Close identification with musical stars - usually female - is hardly the sole preserve of shy boys growing up in the Sixties in Hampshire. Following that initial manifestation, there is a more mature developmental stage to Oklahomosexuality. At some point, usually when falling in lust and/or love, you realise that Streisand's career is perfectly safe and you are, in fact, merely gay.

Nevertheless, in my closeted years, it is significant that my love of musicals was an equally closeted passion. Only after coming out did I stopped being embarrassed by so obvious a giveaway as owning more original cast albums and Streisand LPs than was strictly necessary.

So what is it about musicals that makes them "gay"? After all, heterosexuals have been known to watch them. Even male heterosexuals. There simply aren't enough queens in the world to account for the viewing figures of The Sound of Music.

If it were only gay men who thrilled to the form, why would Twentieth Century Fox have bothered to sign up Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell - two of the world's most legendary male pin-ups - for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? Yet you don't have to be a semiotics student to watch that musical and realise that something's going on. For proof, try the gym sequence, in which Jane Russell, a famously big girl, wears not a lot and sings "Ain't There Anyone Here For Love?". There she is, a panther in a swimsuit, prowling, preening and leaping into the pool with hundreds of men dressed in nothing but shorts and smiles who don't give her a second glance.

In 2000, that scene looks knowing to the nth degree. But it was shot in 1953 when, in the words of the critic Vito Russo, "as far as American cinema was concerned, homosexuality was something you did in Europe or in the dark. Preferably both."

Permitted images were scarce. Non-musical films were hidebound by the conventions of realism which traditionally provided us with images of pain and despair. The unofficial but ruthlessly upheld guidelines for gay men were characters who either flapped their wrists or slit them. Lesbians - usually murderous or just plain miserable - were even thinner on the ground. In the post-liberation era, those ninnies and nancies, predatory sloe-eyed vamps and diesel dykes are re-viewed with ironic affection - a kind of "look back in angora" - but in times when we were starved of positive images and desperate for a route out of invisibility, these creatures were hardly the stuff of our wildest dreams.

So generations of movie-going lesbians and gay men became eagle-eyed about spotting subtextual hints and winks. When it comes to musicals, straight men argue that they can't see the point - which is the whole point. Mind you, some are more subtextual than others. Thoroughly Modern Millie has Beatrice Lillie as a white slave trader operating out of "Big Mary's Tart Shop"; Julie Andrews' Millie befriends Mary Tyler Moore's Dorothy thus rendering her "a friend of Dorothy's" while dreaming of having a flat chest and working for dishy John Gavin who insists on calling her John and telling her to smoke a pipe.

Then there's James Fox in fetching drag, plus Carol Channing playing the xylophone with her feet and being shot out of a cannon. There's also - how shall I put this - a clue in the title song: "Things that we think chic, unique and quite adorable/ They think are odd and Sodom and Gomorrable." The prosecution rests.

Musicals... when they're good, they're very, very good. When they're bad, they're Paint Your Wagon. But even that great galumphing bore shows us that this is a fantasy form that banishes the dreary, confining images of realism. In musicals, men and women can get away with anything, so long as they sing it, like the all-male-bonding wood-chopping ballet in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Imagine that without music?

On the other hand, the gays' gaze is intimately bound up in the business of "translation". The vast majority of iconic musicals have heterosexual plots but lesbians and gays identify with characters by mentally switching their gender, putting ourselves in the place of the lover or the love object. A gay man watching a heterosexual romance identifies with the woman not because he necessarily wants to be a woman, but because he wants to love and/or be loved by the man. Given that musicals offer cinema's most intense and overt declarations of love - deploying song to strengthen and underline the underlying emotions - the form offers up the most extravagant outlet for our desires.

Musicals are unique teaching tools. Disaster movies such as Airplane may teach us how to fly a plane with a divorcing couple, a kid on life-support and a singing nun on board - just so long as you didn't have fish for dinner - but when it comes to our sentimental education, every other genre from Westerns to screwball, from action pictures to three-handkerchief weepies, fades into the background.

* Taken from 'Oklahomo!', an illustrated lecture by David Benedict. www.cornerhouse.org