When DW Griffith was making his first movie in 1913 - the Biblical epic Judith of Bethulia - he faced a dilemma. And that's why, far from being a radical break, it actually fits into a long pattern of Hollywood's very constrained acceptance of gay people. The rules are simple, and stretch back to the first backlot MGM ever built. There are two types of Acceptable Gay Man: you can be a sexless sissy who is fairly happy with his female friends and waspish one-liners, or you can be masculine and actually have a sex drive - in which case you will die.Let's look at the sissies first, because one of the reasons Brokeback seems like an advance is in contrast to this other, more high-pitched Hollywood tradition. As Annie Proulx summarises their situation in the original short story, "Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved." The film is tender and sensitive and (most important) tragic.

And it is indeed a film almost as beautiful as its lead actors, Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger. They play a pair of ranchers who meet and fall in love, but are so pickled in rural homophobia that even as they have impressively athletic anal sex, they mutter, "I'm not a fag." Although Heath begs Jake to settle down (and who wouldn't?), it is never an option They are doomed. Victory? Ang Lee's Brokeback has been hailed as Hollywood's coming-out-of-age, the film that finally shows gay people have been accepted into the American mainstream. Perhaps it is so ignorant of the ways of today's world that it thinks it has no need of PR. Or perhaps it has resigned itself to a world that sees the bear always as malevolent and considers that it has no alternative but to pad slowly back into its forest. More from Mary Dejevsky.

After millennia of persecution and decades of civil rights struggles, gays have finally clambered to the top of the Hollywood Hills. The message from the Homintern is clear: rejoice, rejoice! But - wait - what is the reason for this glee? This week, a movie is released - Brokeback Mountain - that depicts us as pitiful self-hating victims, doomed to loneliness and despair. The great progressive causes require Labour to remain the party of the future. This is the ground on which David Cameron's Conservatives must be beaten.The author is Senior Visiting Fellow at LSE and a former Special Adviser in No 10.