why 'gay' has to be equivalent to 'feminine'

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You apparently don't know any gay men. Most I know are not feminine.

One thing I learned when I was in theater was that you sometimes have to play up stereotypes in order to make characters work on the stage or the screen. Otherwise people may not understand the character or what is going on. Think about it: would this movie have been anywhere near as funny if Albert and Armand were just average guys who happened to be gay? Of course all gay men are not feminine, but a lot of gay men are, and that is how they chose to write these characters. It is kind of unfair that writers capitalize on stereotypes for entertainment. but that is how it works, and as long as they are not being malicious about it, I don't think there is a problem. People may get offended sometimes, but that would happen no matter what. Also, Albert was the super-feminine one. Armand wasn't a "manly-man," but he wasn't flamboyant like Albert. They depicted two very different personalities quite well, and their sexual orientation had little to do with that part of it.

[deleted]

You have to remember that this was shown back in 1996 when the average person in the US were more familiar with male gay stereotypes than how many gay men actually were. There weren't a lot of portrayals of gay men on tv or in the mainstream cinema. 99.9% of the big blockbuster films made had no homosexual men or women in their storylines, let alone as a main character. You might see one or two but generally they were played up to be feminine. I remember when this film came out people were pretty amazed by how it DIDN'T fit into their expectations of how gay men actually were.

By today's standards yes, this film is just full of stereotypes but for the era it was broke a lot of new ground. Think about all of the things that happened in the entertainment field just after this film was released. Ellen came out in her show in 1997. In & Out came out in 1997. Will & Grace aired in 1998.

Was The Birdcage directly responsible for this? Maybe so, maybe no, but you can't deny that the general public embracing the movie definitely helped show that the general public was willing to accept a gay man in a role where he wasn't the comic relief and in roles where they portrayed parents, businessmen, and just plain ordinary people.

And like others said, Armand wasn't a feminine character either. Again, this was done during 1996. Most people didn't know that gay men came in any other flavor than flamboyantly feminine. This movie was responsible for opening a lot of eyes. It's not really fair to judge it against today's standards when for 1996 this was a very controversial and cutting edge film.

Not all gay men are feminine, but some are. I worked with a man who used to wear "Hello Kitty" socks and spoke in a very soft feminine voice (once he said to me regarding Kylie Minogue "if I was a man, I'd do her"). Some do see themselves as more of a woman than they do a man. Others, you'd never know were gay, and are men as men generally tend to be.

Some straight men are quite feminine, and some straight women are very masculine too and believe it or not, not all lesbians are 'butch'. These things are just summed up to personality and mannerisms and don't necessarily point towards a person's sexuality.

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We've become a race of peeping toms.

Why do movies portray manly characters who don't agree with the gay lifestyle as hateful, homophobes who turn out gay? It IS possible to not agree with someone's lifestyle without hating them or hiding in the closet yourself. So silly, but typical of the lib Hollywood.

Armand wasn't feminine. What are you talking about?