Pop quiz: name the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster released in the last decade that featured blink-and-you’ll-miss-it LGBT representation that was nonetheless touted by those involved as being a major step forward. Answer: where do I begin …

Because I could be referring to Beauty and the Beast, or Ghostbusters, or Charlie’s Angels, or Star Trek: Beyond, or Independence Day: Resurgence, or Avengers: Endgame, or Alien: Covenant, or Deadpool, or Solo, or Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, or Thor: Ragnarok – a high-wattage list of self-congratulatory letdowns, empty promises standing in for actual progress. Each allegedly featured some form of queerness yet each example was so prudish and so underplayed that you’d be forgiven for not realising it was even there.

The overwhelming straightness of mainstream cinema has gone mostly unchallenged for years, studios unwilling to allow gay characters into the multiplex, leaving them to flourish in the arthouse instead. While it’s been gratifying to see films like Moonlight, A Fantastic Woman, Call Me by Your Name, Weekend, Tangerine and Portrait of a Lady on Fire excel, there’s something uneasy and othering about always seeing our lives on the outskirts, usually within films where being queer is the central thrust of the plot. The aforementioned attempts to permit non-straight characters into franchise fare were viewed by some as an indication of a more accepting industry, one that was also finally allowing women and people of colour to save the world alongside white straight men.

But from Josh Gad fleetingly dancing with another man in a Disney movie (obnoxiously heralded in press at the time as an “exclusively gay moment”), to John Cho seen with what we can sort of guess is his male partner in a Star Trek sequel (a confirming kiss was cut, obviously), to being told after the fact that Tessa Thompson, Kate McKinnon, Donald Glover, Ryan Reynolds and Kristen Stewart were playing queer characters (despite no on-screen proof), it’s all been embarrassingly and infuriatingly coy.