Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s film about two gay cowboys who fall in love, leads this year’s Oscar nominations by contending in eight categories, including the prestigious triumvirate of best picture, best director, and best actor awards. And unlike TV’s recent superficial and flitting obsession with all things gay and metrosexual, the film’s multiple nominations lends gay issues a visibility and conversations about them a weight that it hitherto lacked in the mainstream media.  

Being gay became almost faddish in the media recently, with the slew of TV programs — Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Boy Meets Boy — that, while they didn’t normalize homosexuality, certainly increased its visibility. Ever the vanguard of truly trashy television, the Fox network almost waded into hitherto unimaginably tasteless ground in 2004 with a show that was to be called Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay. Bowing to pressure and a startling sense of decency, Fox cancelled the two-hour show, ostensibly for “creative reasons.” But these shows, while giving airtime to gay TV personalities, reduced homosexuality to a facile stereotype of the consumerist, vain, and fashion-conscious gay man.

Brokeback Mountain refuses to stoop to the grotesque stereotypes that the Fox and Bravo networks so greedily capitalized on, and its multiple nominations legitimize its foray into addressing gay issues. The Academy Awards will be aired on March 5th.

Mimi Hanaoka