Gay men in entertainment have made incredible strides in recent years, scoring at the Oscars, the Emmys, on Broadway and the bestseller lists. It's enough to make a person think that we've arrived. That we've entered some golden age, where all will be perfect, or nearly so, from here on out.

Not so fast. For one thing, despite a few high-profile projects, we're still not represented in books and movies and TV shows in numbers anywhere near our actual percentage of the population.

And as I've written before, we're especially under-represented in stories that aren't specifically about Being Gay, or in genre projects like fantasy, mystery, or science fiction.

Basically, we've conquered the urban areas, the blue states, and most of the European Union; we're finally starting to become well-represented in our strongholds, in our little specialized media niches: online, or in art house theaters, on cable television, and in Broadway theaters or big city bookstores and libraries.

But there are still vast swaths of the world where gay content is almost unheard of, or where the gay content that does exist is watered down or “balanced” so as to not “offend” conservative Christian sensibilities. Last year, the Oklahoma state house went so far as to pass a bill requiring that all public libraries put gay-themed books, even picture books, in a special “adults-only” section. But I'll hazard a guess that public libraries in Oklahoma aren't buying a lot of gay-themed books to begin with.

In other words, for all our recent success, gay content is still controversial; we still haven't quite gone mainstream. Brokeback Mountain, for all its acclaim and publicity, made “only” $83 million in domestic release, slightly more than half of what the last Tom Cruise movie Mission Impossible 3 made, which, incidentally, was considered a disappointment. Another Gay Movie, which has been seen by literally every gay person I know, has made less than a million dollars in domestic release.

So how do we break out of our entertainment ghetto? After all, gay people live everywhere. And people everywhere need to know how we live. No one would ever suggest it's acceptable for stories with African American content to be censored from much of the country, right?

But moving ahead won't be easy. In fact, the obstacles we face may be some of the scariest and most infuriating that we've faced yet.

That's because the obstacles we face now are institutional ones.

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting conversation with an author friend who was considering writing a teen science fiction book with a main character who is gay. Her editor loved the idea, but warned her that, despite her solid track-record, her book probably wouldn't be picked up by chains like Walmart and Target—outlets that now represent 40 percent or more of the book market. For a teen book like the ones this author and I both write, gay content also effectively rules out placement in a book club or school book fair—placements that can literally mean sales of hundreds of thousands of books.