"The Oscars opened the closet door to gay-themed films but shut it almost as quickly," Reuters reports:
"Brokeback Mountain," the much-ballyhooed favorite about two gay cowboys, won best director for Ang Lee on Sunday but stunningly lost the best picture prize to race drama "Crash." Additionally Philip Seymour Hoffman won best actor for playing gay novelist Truman Capote in "Capote."
The victory for "Crash" suggested Oscar voters were more comfortable with a tale that exploited the seamy underbelly of racial conflict in contemporary Los Angeles than with a heartbreaking tale of love between two married men.
"Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don't want cowboys to be gay," said Larry McMurtry.
In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who've led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed "Brokeback Mountain."
And the San Francisco Chronicle reports that gays were "brokenhearted" over the "Brokeback" loss:
"I think that's an absolute horror," said Brad Bruner, who is a leader in the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association.
"It's an outright sign of homophobia in our country. ('Crash') won no awards before this. It makes me sick."
