Can Macho, Non-Metro Actors Play Gay?

After a dozen years of trying to get "Milk" made, the film finally received the green light when Penn signed on.

"Of all the colors in the rainbow, green [the color of money] still seems to be the most important," Canfield said.

She points out that the number of A-list movie stars who can get a movie produced just by signing on is already small. For gay actors, it's nonexistent. Prominent openly gay actors Sir Ian McKellen and Rupert Everett haven't been able to do it, Canfield said.

"Who are our big movie stars who are openly gay? Is there an A-list?" Canfield said. "No, there is not."

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Meanwhile, audiences appear to have little trouble accepting tough guy Penn as a gay man on screen -- in his personal life, he has scrapped with paparazzi and carried a rifle through New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

"I think he does a remarkable job," said Gregg Kilday, the film editor for The Hollywood Reporter. "He seems to inhabit Milk's milieu, his mannerisms and his spirit."

"Sean Penn often plays very intense characters that keep the world at a distance," Kilday said. "As Milk he's alternately playful and warm. At his core there is a toughness to Milk and also a lightness. That's the real surprise, that Penn captures the lightness as well."

Kilday does not believe that Penn approached this role differently than any other.

"In this case he's playing a real person. He clearly had a lot of research to draw on, a lot of footage of Harvey Milk, friends like Cleve Jones, who served as advisers," Kilday said. "My sense is both he and Van Sant wanted to make the gay sexuality as matter of fact as they could. So they introduced it right at the beginning of film and treated it as casually as the people would have treated it at the time."

While the door has swung open for straight actors to play gay roles, the reverse -- gay actors in straight roles -- is still rare, at least on the big screen.

Cheyenne Jackson, the hunky male star of Broadway shows "Xanadu" and "All Shook Up," has acknowledged that since coming out of the closet, he's unlikely to get leading man roles, though he has gotten a cameo on the NBC drama "Lipstick Jungle" and a small role in the film "United 93."