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It used to be that the Academy Awards were one of the great gay holidays: parties in bars, endless chatter about who would and wouldn't win what, and the speculation on who was gay and who should be. There were also the recycled memories of past moments of sublimeness and idiocy-- Liz winning for her near-death experience rather then her acting in Butterfield 8, Barbara tripping up the steps to get the Oscar for Funny Girl, Ruth Gordon thanking the Academy for finally giving her an award at the age of 72 for Rosemary's Baby-- that were always part of queen lore.

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Of course this is what gay men always talked about because, well, there were no gay movies or characters at the Oscars. The event was all about gay sensibility not gay content-- it was, in many ways, the apotheosis of mainstream gay male sensibility: it was bright, glittering, very gay, and closeted. But the importance of the Oscars has gradually faded from gay male culture. Sure, there are some Oscar parties at bars-- a few years ago they were a staple of AIDS fundraising. But while Oscar's gay caché has dipped, the movies themselves have become far gayer.

This year there are an array of queer films and characters-- and a maturity to them-- that we've never really seen before. Stephen Daldry's The Hours-- based on Michael Cunningham's novel-- featuring many gay and lesbian characters, is up for nine Oscars. Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven (which turns on a gay plot twist) is up for four. Frida-- based on the life of Frida Kahlo-- deals honestly (well, semi-honestly) with its protagonist's lesbianism and is up for six awards. Y Tu Mama Tambien, which features a polymorphously perverse series of interlocking relationships and a lot of male nudity, is up for best screenplay. And the great Pedro Almodovar is up for best director and best screenplay. While Almodovar's film Talk to Her has no specific gay content, lets face it, anything Almodovar does is pretty queer, and this film-- with its woozy connections between sex, lust, love, death, near-necrophilia, and religious devotion-- is very queer.

So why aren't the Oscar's as gay as they used to be? Part of the reason is that the Oscar's aren't what they used to be. Sure, they get attention, but in the 1950s, and even until the late 1960s, they were a premiere cultural event for all of America. In many ways their prestige as a gay event has dropped along with their mainstream status. And-- not that it isn't all too obvious-- movie stars aren't what they used to be. "We had faces then," spits out Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard as she decries the fall of Hollywood glamour, and while acting is probably, on the whole, far better today then 50 years ago, the category of "movies star" is much diminished. And the decline and fall of the movie star was deeply felt in a gay culture that relied on the likes of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Eve Arden, Vivian Leigh, Judy Garland, and even the silliness of a Sonja Henie or Vera Hruba Ralston for comforting notions of beauty, wit, and resilience.

Putting the ho in 'Hollywood'

But perhaps the primary reason why the Academy Awards are less of a gay event is precisely because there are so many manifestations of queerness now on the silver screen. Gay men were attracted to Hollywood for its hyper-glamorous, fantasy version of real life. But the fantasy depended on the idea of "the closet." At a time when it was far more difficult to come out safely, to be present in the world, to even see representation of yourself on the screen, the mythos of Hollywood was a substitute, an elaborate screen-- so to speak-- on which gay men could project their emotional lives that had to be carefully micro-managed in the material world. So in the end, the more visible gay people could become, the less important the fabulousness of Hollywood and the silver screen would seem.

In the end the question is: would you rather see Meryl Streep and Ed Harris as a lesbian and a gay men in a realistic and complicated relationship on screen in The Hours, or would you rather project your inner life onto Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve? Would you rather see complicated male relationships enacted in Y Tu Mama Tambien or related in a subtextual way to performers like Edward Everett Horton or Tony Randall? Of course, we don't really have a choice: Stonewall happened, gay culture changed, more people came out, new aesthetics implanted themselves-- and Hollywood is now a very different place.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com