Labelling

What is it about men that prevents them from having the balls to play a gay guy in a movie?

I was watching bits and pieces of this movie called Girlfriend (Isha Koppikar and Armita Arora) on TV as India snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (yet again).

What struck me abt this movie was the fact that this was the second or third Indian movie I had seen where the lead character was homosexual. The common theme I noticed was that Nandita Das (with oodles of panache), Shaban Azmi (with grim determination) and Isha Koppikar (with a generous dose of bloody-mindedness) played convincing parts; without any gestures, mannerisms or any other suggestions or attempts at typecasting. The homo-sexual nature of character came through in the words and the actions - as it was meant to be. Mind you - I'm not comparing the relative worth of the movies themselves - just the lead characters and the people who played them. The homo-sexual lead character was a real 3-D person. Not a sex-driven maniac. Not a prop. And definitely not a caricature.

My big question is this... When (ignoring Mango Souffle) did you last see an Indian male actor/star do a serious role as a homo-sexual character?
It isn't that our writers don't know how to create convincing homo-sexual characters. Maybe it is just that our leading men have not the guts to play a serious homo-sexual character. Maybe we - men - are more afraid of the label "gay" than women are of the label "lesbian".
Why? Is "fear" really the word I'm looking for? Or should go for it's Martian twin Deimos?

(This needs more thought; but I'm too tired to stand up, let alone drive. Can someone pick up the cigarettes for me?)