Why Can't A Kiss Just Be a Kiss?

"If you wanted, I'd be willing to kiss you right now," Franco offered. (And then he kissed Dave on the cheek. Cue more screams from audience.)

"This kind of thing goes on any time there's a movie where two men kiss; and whether it's a gay audience or a mainstream audience, it's something everyone wants to know about. It's titillating," says Corey Scholibo, entertainment editor for the Advocate magazine.

"At a certain point, the joking about it . . . just isn't funny anymore," he says. "And it's disappointing for gay people. It's especially not as funny as it might have been a month ago, before Proposition 8 was passed," amending California's constitution to forbid gay marriage.

"No one ever asks Neil Patrick Harris what it's like to play a straight guy who sleeps with lots of women" on the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," Scholibo says. "No one ever asks him how 'gross' it is to kiss a woman."

To answer this, Scholibo takes off his gay media hat and puts forth the biggest academic "duh" in cultural studies: "Everything in culture is rooted in the idea of masculinity, patriarchy . . . hegemony. You have to be disgusted by two men kissing, otherwise there goes [your] masculinity. If an actor were to say he enjoyed a scene where he kisses another man, then he's somehow less of a man."

Straight actors who've taken on gay roles usually give the same answer -- a combination of disgust, bravado (resolving to get through it and earn their paycheck) and the sure-is-weird feeling of stubble not their own.

"Soon as they say 'cut,' you spit. You want to go to a strip bar or touch the makeup girls. You feel dirty. It's a tough job," Chris Potter, an actor in Showtime's "Queer as Folk," once told MSNBC. (Another actor from that show, Hal Sparks, was more circumspect: "Definitely there's an ick factor. It's a little bit like French-kissing your dad. When you don't have the internal impetus that makes you gay in the first place, you're kind of flying blind in that area. I don't get it. But then that's even more evidence, I think, for the argument that people should be allowed to be who they are.")

Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger fielded kissing questions a thousand different ways when "Brokeback Mountain" was released in 2005. After the stubble answer ("One word," Gyllenhaal told People about Ledger's face: "Exfoliate") and the ooky answer ("That why we had stunt doubles," Ledger quipped about the love scenes to CBS's "Early Show"), after all the stale "I wish I knew how to quit you" jokes and the "Best Kiss" prize from the MTV Movie Awards, Gyllenhaal finally started telling interviewers that it was like kissing anybody else -- "like doing a love scene with a woman I'm not particularly attracted to," he told the London Telegraph.

Rex Wockner, a syndicated San Diego journalist who for nearly two decades has diligently compiled a weekly "Quote Unquote" column of people talking about gay-related topics, shared some of his favorite "kissing" quotes from celebrity interviews. The most common theme? Weirdness, revulsion and finally surrender.

Here's macho man Colin Farrell, talking about his gay love scenes in "Alexander" in 2004: "I didn't enjoy kissing the men any more than I am sure a gay guy would enjoy licking a woman's [bleep]. I find it repulsive when a guy's stubble is pressed against my lip."

Dennis Quaid told the Associated Press in 2002 about getting it just right in "Far From Heaven": "By Take 3 it was just fine, just another scene. We both went after each other like a couple of linebackers to begin with. And [director Todd Haynes] had to, like, stop . . . and say, 'Hey, it's a '50s screen kiss, okay?' "

Toby Jones seemed over the moon in 2007, discussing his kiss with Daniel Craig in "Infamous," the other Truman Capote movie: "I've never dreamt that I would kiss James Bond. . . . Now I've done it, I can say that I hope I am the first of many. . . . It was slightly abrasive, but ultimately rewarding. And neither of us are gay." (Not that there's anything -- eh, you know.)