In the last five to seven years there has a been a surge of feel-good films targeted at the middle-class black community--from ensemble dramas like The Best Man, Waiting to Exhale, The Wood, The Brothers and Kingdom Come to romantic comedies like Brown Sugar, How Stella Got her Groove Back, Love and Basketball, Love Jones, and Two Can Play That Game.

The middle-class, professional, and law-abiding African-American characters in these films have provided a long-awaited contrast to the overwhelming number of African-American movie characters Hollywood has churned out that are poor, self-destructive, and/or criminals (there's nothing wrong with being poor, of course, but this is hardly representative of all African-Americans).

These films were welcome by many because, for the first time, they assumed a middle-class black audience--or at least an audience that is familiar and comfortable with middle-class African-Americans.

Bottom line: these films were written and directed by black folks for black folks--and it shows.

So what do these movies say about black lesbians and bisexual women? Nothing good. In fact, from watching these films, one comes away with the following messages about the black community:

1. Straight black people do not have lesbians among their family or friends. This absence is particularly glaring given that these films encompass such a wide variety of black women--the uptight lawyer, the hairdresser, the obsessed athlete, the stay-at-home mom, the office ho, the dying friend, the workaholic stockbroker in love with a man half her age, the woman whose husband leaves her for a white woman. But no lesbians.

Among the black male characters, you have the ex-convict, the uptight lawyer, the mechanic, the player, the poet, the deadbeat dad, the cheater, and the consummate family man. You even have the black gay man (albeit only occasionally and not usually flatteringly)--from the black gay republican characters in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus to Gloria's gay ex-husband and the ubiquitous gay hairdresser in Waiting to Exhale.

There's every kind of black middle-class character in these movies but the kitchen sink--and lesbians.

This happens even in settings where the context almost requires their inclusion. Love and Basketball, for example, is a movie set in the world of women's basketball where (in real life) lesbians not only exist, they arguably exist in disproportionate number. But in the movie? Nary a lesbian (of any color) in sight.

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