James Franco, that jack of all media, is on yet another artistic mission: The star of the soon-to-be-released Disney film Oz: The Great and Powerful is hell-bent on bringing gay sex into mainstream Hollywood cinema. Adding to an already considerable oeuvre of gay-themed projects such as Sal, Howl, Milk, and The Feast of Stephen, Franco and co-director Travis Matthews’s Interior. Leather Bar., which premiered at last month’s Sundance Film Festival, attempts to recreate the “missing” 40 minutes of footage that William Friedkin had to cut from his controversial 1980 film Cruising in order to obtain an ‘R’ rating from the MPAA. In the quasi-documentary, Franco discusses how it was “a little shocking” to watch two men have sex, but only because his “mind has been twisted by the way that the world has been set up around me.” “Every fucking love story is a dude that wants to be with a girl,” he says. “I’m fucking sick of that shit.” Franco then sums up Hollywood’s mentality: “Oh, don’t show gay sex, don’t do that, that’s the fucking devil. In previews, show people getting blown away and killed, but don’t show gay sex.”

Does he have a point? The gay rights movement has made exponential strides in the past 20 years, but one has to wonder if Hollywood has been paying attention. Sure, gay characters abound on television, from “Modern Family” to “Glee” to “The New Normal,” but beyond the split-second lip lock, audiences are rarely being exposed to man-on-man action. Even in celebrated gay movies such as Brokeback Mountain or My Own Private Idaho, the camera usually cuts away just before the action turns R-rated. By largely ignoring gay male sexuality onscreen, Hollywood seems to be reinforcing the shame associated with gay sex. This is doubly disappointing given that Hollywood is home to some of the gay community’s strongest allies, celebrities who spoke out against Prop 8 in California, hold countless AIDS fundraisers, and participate in “It Gets Better” videos.

If anything, things may be getting worse. None of this year’s Oscar nominations for acting involve a gay role. And even when Hollywood has bestowed an award for playing gay, it’s always been given to a straight actor who had the “courage” to take on the role, a la Tom Hanks in Philadelphia or William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman. No openly gay actor has ever won an Academy Award.

The movie studios told Soderbergh his Liberace biopic was "too gay."

When discussing his Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, soon to premiere on HBO, Steven Soderbergh has repeatedly chastised the movie studios for turning down his movie as “too gay.” "We went to everybody in town," Soderbergh told The Wrap. "We needed $5 million. Nobody would do it…. They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after Brokeback Mountain, by the way…. I was stunned.” And when repeatedly asked about his gay sex scenes in Kill Your Darlings, which also premiered at Sundance, Daniel Radcliffe told MTV: “It’s interesting that it’s deemed shocking. For me, there’s something very strange about that because we see straight sex scenes all the time…. I don’t know why a gay sex scene should be any more shocking than a straight sex scene.”

Why indeed. But Hollywood largely caters to one audience in particular—straight males—and occasionally to less-profitable audiences, like straight women or children. In an industry as averse to risk and as driven by the bottom line as the film business, it’s not all that surprising that gay male sex rarely, if ever, makes it to the screen: Studio heads have long been convinced that gay storylines don’t play well, and that gay sex turns audiences off. But shouldn’t we be seeing some cracks in this aversion to onscreen male-on-male sex? Why, if our culture has become more accepting of LGBT rights, do these feelings linger?