"Dying Young,"starring Julia Roberts and Campbell Scott, is Hollywood's first AIDS movie. The film appears to deal with a young man's fight with leukemia and his redemption by (heterosexual) romance. The subtext -- the denial of AIDS and the saving of a young man from death by a woman -- is relentlessly heterosexist.

Heterosexism is the presumption that the privileges of heterosexual relationships are well-deserved, since heterosexual life is seen as nature's design.

In some ways more pernicious than overt discrimination and violence against lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people, heterosexism denies their existence, rendering their lives invisible.

To make a film about "dying young" that concerns a single male who lives alone in San Francisco in 1991 is to take full -- if unacknowledged -- advantage of the AIDS epidemic while totally avoiding its reality.

There have been 10,284 cases of HIV/AIDS reported in San Francisco since 1981. Two-thirds of all men with AIDS have been under 40 years old. Two-thirds of all male cases have occurred in gay or bisexual men. "Dying Young" hardly tells the stories of most of the young men who are literally dying young in San Francisco.

The AIDS epidemic is alluded to continually in the film, though there is absolutely no mention of it. The use of San Francisco -- the city most associated with gay men -- is hardly incidental.

The male lead elicits strong associations. Campbell Scott's last film was the independently produced "Longtime Companion," in which he played a young gay man living in terror of the virus that is decimating his friends on Fire Island in New York.

Scott's character in this film can readily be seen as gay. He is given a minimal heterosexual history -- one girlfriend in college. He lives alone, in a huge mansion. He mentions, jokingly, that an earlier applicant for the job Roberts takes as his nurse/savior was a man in a skirt. At one point, he calls himself "Victor/Victorious," a reference to Blake Edwards' gender-bending film "Victor/Victoria."

Much of the tension in the film comes from a love triangle in which Scott's character competes for Roberts' attention with a local man -- a rustic, boorish-yet-caring, jock-type -- who represents traditional heterosexuality.

Scott's effete, "sensitive" fan of classical music and upscale apartment design embodies the classic postmodern gay urban male stereotype cleverly submerged in the veneer of a "new man." New, yes, but surely not gay!

There's more. The first shot of Scott evokes the many images of AIDS we've all seen (or tried to avoid seeing) -- emaciated young men dying we see on documentaries or in the news.

The film then makes the typical, psychological contrast to an earlier (and healthier) life, a natural reaction we all have when we see young men with AIDS becoming literal shadows of their former selves. The scenes of chemotherapy, vomiting, chronic pain and the quest for salvation through death are surely part of leukemia, but their current associations to AIDS are unmistakable and powerful.

In "Dying Young," AIDS has been cosmeticized and literally romanced out of existence by the Hollywood dream factory. The denial is made much more offensive by the heterosexist theme -- love between a man and a woman is life-saving; love between two men can't even be imagined.

A gay man can be redeemed by repudiating his gay life, which the film finds too unspeakable to ever mention. Perhaps "true love" can prevent death. Julia Roberts is the cure for AIDS!

"Dying Young" is a heterosexist fantasy that suggests that gay men dying of AIDS might be cured through the love of a woman. Would Americans not accept a man in the Julia Roberts role? Can't America accept an honest portrayal of the caring and commitment between men that has not only prolonged life during the epidemic but has also prevented new infections?

Must Hollywood insult us all by exploiting the AIDS epidemic (112,000 adults and 1,600 children have died so far) by using images of and associations to gay life only to shake a heterosexist moral finger?

Perhaps I "see" the film as a gay man. But I doubt any aware viewer can avoid thoughts of AIDS while seeing this film. We cannot deny the realities of AIDS, try as we might. Leave it to Hollywood to turn to today's "pretty woman" to perpetuate our collective denial.

Surely we are all pained by so many young men dying young, but we cannot continue to deny who they are. Colluding with denial does not make for a pretty picture; producing a big-budget metaphor for the AIDS epidemic that is deeply hurtful of gay men is a moral offense of a very different order. "Dying Young" is gay-bashing -- 1991 Hollywood style.