Are they or aren’t they?

Once upon a time, men of a certain age who had never married were simply known as bachelors. Only a few impolite snoops pried into these aging gentlemen’s sexual orientation. If you think that innocent era is long gone, think again. Bachelors are back in a surprising number of current movies featuring characters whose sexuality is, to say the least, ambiguous.

At a time when overt homosexuality has a diminished role on the big screen, it’s turning up in coded, disguised form, almost as it did in the days chronicled in Vito Russo’s book (and subsequent documentary) “The Celluloid Closet.” Among the stars playing characters with homoerotic shadings this spring are Jack Nicholson in “Anger Management,” Dustin Hoffman in “Confidence,” Al Pacino in “People I Know” and Nick Nolte in “The Good Thief.” Many people may miss the hidden sexual content, but it’s there to titillate the cognoscenti.

Studios and producers are running scared these days, partly because of the conservative political climate, and partly because of a stubborn obsession with the bottom line. The fastidious treatment of homosexuality is just one indication of this skittish mood. Although some of these new closet-case pictures have their sly pleasures, it’s dismaying that we’ve regressed to the kind of coy storytelling more reminiscent of the 1950s.

Homosexuality has a tortured, tortuous history in Hollywood, so the latest furtive trend is just another chapter in an ongoing saga of subterfuge. The old Production Code that straitjacketed American movies from 1934 to 1968 declared that “sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.” Even in that pristine epoch, however, not all inferences were excised. Homoerotic hints kept sneaking into movies, particularly comedies. In the ‘30s, actors such as Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton played prissy sidekicks whose sexuality was pretty flaming. Laurel and Hardy came off as a bickering married couple. Bob Hope often played a dandified coward who wasn’t exactly a masculine role model.

In Hollywood dramas, Hollywood presented fairly sensationalized treatments of homosexuality in “Advise and Consent,” “The Children’s Hour” and “The Sergeant.” It wasn’t until the boom of independent film in the ‘80s that we saw a more relaxed view of homosexuality in such movies as “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Lianna” and “Parting Glances.” Queer cinema blossomed over the next decade, and Hollywood gingerly followed suit in “The Birdcage,” “Philadelphia” and “In & Out.” These mainstream movies had a lot of failings enumerated by gay activists, but they had one virtue appreciated by the studios: They made money.

Soon, however, the novelty wore off, and audiences dwindled. Once-daring independent companies began to shy away from gay themes when they realized that even the most acclaimed, award-laden efforts such as “Gods and Monsters” had limited box-office potential. Last year’s gay and lesbian film festival, Outfest, opened with a program of short films, an indication of how few high-quality gay features were being produced. The festival filled out the rest of its slots with documentaries, esoteric foreign films and other movies with minimal gay content like the recently released “Lawless Heart.”

At the same time that feature films have retreated, television has been forging ahead with overtly gay material. “Will & Grace” remains one of the most popular shows on the tube, and cable series such as “Six Feet Under” and “Queer as Folk” have passionate followings. In fact, there’s so much gay material on television that movie producers may feel audiences have become sated. They may also be stymied trying to come up with fresh stories to tell. Conflicts surrounding coming out, homophobia and AIDS have been dramatized repeatedly.

For all of these reasons, there’s a vacuum in feature films at the moment. But we all know that nature abhors a vacuum, and it will be filled in one way or another. To be blunt, a lot of artists are gay, and even those who aren’t may be curious or at least willing to consider the polymorphous possibilities.

That’s one way to explain the unexpected homoerotic undercurrents of the hit comedy “Anger Management.” Jack Nicholson has pretty much defined himself as the most macho of stars, and it must have seemed like a tantalizing change of pace for him to explore the fey side of the beret-sporting Dr. Buddy Rydell. He moves in with the repressed rageaholic Dave Buznik (Adam Sandler) to help him turn his life around. Is Buddy meant to be gay?

Admittedly the question is never definitively resolved, but there are a few telltale signs. In the movie’s most hilarious scene, Buddy tries to calm the jumpy Dave by forcing him to stop in traffic and join him in a duet of “I Feel Pretty.” Buddy also hops into bed with Dave and provocatively informs him that he sleeps in the nude. Later, Buddy tries to loosen Dave up by urging him to proposition a transvestite hooker played by Woody Harrelson (another macho actor who seems delighted to don a pair of high heels).

Doubtless, there will be those who will say I’m reading in something that was never intended, but I would counter: How many straight therapists are musical theater queens, well versed on the hangouts of transvestite hookers and eager to share a bed with their male clients? The movie never suggests that Buddy has any interest in women. At one point, he moves in on Dave’s girlfriend (Marisa Tomei), but this is merely a sham courtship designed to prod Dave into taking action to save the relationship. Once she and Dave are reunited, Buddy returns to his happy bachelor state.

Hoffman was definitely aware of the gay undertones of “Confidence” because he added those elements to the script. According to the film’s director, James Foley, it was Hoffman who suggested that his character -- a sleazy, hyperkinetic crime lord known as the King -- should be bisexual. After meeting the film’s star, Edward Burns, Hoffman recognized that there could be some provocative erotic byplay between them.

Hoffman is one of the smartest stars around. He’s undoubtedly aware that actors -- who make their living by keeping their identity fluid -- have an ambisexual inclination, and he’s secure enough to find the exploration of that slippery slope stimulating rather than threatening. He eagerly surrendered to his feminine side in “Tootsie,” and he gives another vibrant performance as the bisexual King in “Confidence.”

There’s something murkier about the sexuality of the dissolute Bob (Nick Nolte) in “The Good Thief.” Like Nicholson and Hoffman’s characters, Bob is well into middle age and has never formed any lasting heterosexual attachments. Although he hesitantly gets involved with a young Russian woman (Nutsa Kukhianidze), she pursues him. And one can’t help wondering about Bob’s relationships with the various young men whom he seems to take a special interest in protecting.

Similarly, the New York publicist Pacino skewers so deftly in “People I Know” seems captivated by handsome young men; he makes sure that a hot male model is seated next to him at a benefit in the movie’s climactic scene. I suspect that these touches will sail right past many viewers, especially because Pacino’s Eli Wurman also seems to be harboring romantic yearnings for his brother’s widow, played by Kim Basinger.

Like Hoffman, Pacino has demonstrated a willingness to impersonate all kinds of characters; he was one of the first major Hollywood stars to play a non-stereotypical gay man in the memorable “Dog Day Afternoon.” So it seems curious that this time his character’s sexuality is so muffled.

These are schizoid, fearful times, and maybe that’s why popular entertainment is giving us mixed messages -- explicit gay sex scenes on Showtime’s “Queer as Folk,” and mysteriously muted hints of homosexuality in “People I Know” and “Anger Management.” Eventually there is sure to be another milestone gay movie that grabs the public’s attention. In the meantime, it’s kind of fun -- if also mildly frustrating -- to ferret out the lavender subtext of these oblique, subterranean gay movies that are blithely bamboozling many of their most enthusiastic audiences.

Stephen Farber is a film critic for Movieline magazine, and writes and teaches about film in Los Angeles.