It is a thespian curse half as old but twice as hoary as the Scottish Play. For decades many of cinema's most famous actors have gone to inordinate lengths to avoid portraying homosexuals on screen, fearing damage to their careers, but will the 2003 Golden Globe Awards go down as the night on which the curse was laid to rest?

Walking down the red carpet at tonight's ceremony in Hollywood will be seven straight actors who have been recognised for their performances in roles against sexual type, including Meryl Streep, who kisses another Globe-nominated actress, Allison Janney, in The Hours, and Denis Quaid, who plays a sexually repressed husband who comes out in Todd Haynes' pastiche 1950s drama, Far from Heaven. 'I really don't think it's all that groundbreaking or shocking any more,' said Quaid, who has seen his fading career revived by his performance in the film. Streep was equally dismissive. 'It wasn't a hardship job,' she says of her kiss. 'They didn't have to give me extra pay.'

Such levity is a world away from the attitude shown by the likes of Will Smith, who played a gay character in the 1992 film Six Degrees of Separation but was so worried about playing the role that he faked an on-screen kiss with another man. The avowedly macho Mel Gibson went as far as changing the sexuality of his character in the film adaptation of the book The Man Without a Face.

'Characters in films have always had their gayness taken away by the film industry, principly because many Hollywood agents told their clients that playing a gay role would be the kiss of death,' said Richard Barrios, whose book Screened Out details the film industry's long and inglorious record of homophobia. 'Actors were scared of guilt by association, that people would think just because they were playing gay, people would think they were gay, which is ridiculous really. After all, does anybody think Anthony Hopkins is a cannibal, or that Glenn Close is a homocidal nymphomaniac?'

Among those also nominated tonight are Nicole Kidman, who plays the bisexual English writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours; Salma Hayek, producer and star of Frida, the critically acclaimed film about bisexual painter Frida Kahlo; and Eric McCormack and Sean Hayes, who both star in the gay sitcom Will and Grace.

Since the silent movie era, when the actor William Haines was told by studio executives to ditch his boyfriend or give up his successful career - he ditched the career - Hollywood has assumed the American public would not accept homosexuality. Gay roles were few and far between in the decades that followed and any that were offered, in films such as Alfred Hitchcock's The Rope, were usually filled by gay actors.

Attitudes changed in the Sixties and Seventies but the box-office failure of films such as The Killing of Sister George merely reaffirmed studio attitudes that homosexuality was not a profitable business.

It was not until the Nineties, with the critical and financial success of movies such as Philadelphia, in which Tom Hanks played a gay lawyer dying from Aids; My Own Private Idaho; and My Best Friend's Wedding, which starred a gay leading man, Rupert Everett, playing a gay character, that the industry has become more comfortable with on-screen homosexuality

Barrios said: 'The mere fact that we are discussing the fact that so many straight actors are being nominated for gay roles, suggests this is still an issue. If we can get to the stage where a star plays another sexuality and have no one blink, then we will be truly blessed.'

His sentiments were echoed by Todd Haynes, both gay and a successful director. Haynes said: 'We're caught in this cycle of being shocked by it and having all these same discussions over and over again. It is as if society is still threatened by it.'