Horsefeathers

Needless to say, Hensher is being cheeky. All the actors he mentioned lived and worked in an era when the closet was an unavoidable reality and living a free and open gay life well nigh an idle dream. But that dream is now a reality, and in coming to grips with it, the speculation and whispers of the past are being reconfigured as matters of simple fact. Those guys were gay. Deal with it. More importantly, today’s out gay actors — Chad Allen, Craig Chester, Mitchell Anderson, Dan Butler, David Drake and Peter Paige — have to deal with the “incredible fact” that they’ve been left to fend for themselves in indie and pay-TV climes. But when it comes to parts like Ennis Del Mar, Jack Twist and Truman Capote, they’re not even going to get an audition. Only heterosexuals need apply.

Yes, things have changed, but not all that much, as Craig Lucas shows in his deliciously mean-spirited The Dying Gaul. In a key scene, Campbell Scott’s scheming bisexual producer tells Peter Sarsgaard’s sensitive gay writer, “No one goes to the movies to have a bad time, or to learn anything,” before going on to declare matter-of-factly: “Americans hate gay people.”

“What about Philadelphia?” Sarsgaard counters.

“Philadelphia was about a man who hated gay people,” Scott replies.

But Scott’s most telling remark comes as he prepares to seduce Sarsgaard (far more graphically than Ledger does Gyllenhaal): “You can do anything you want — just so long as you don’t call it by its name.”

And the name you can’t use around a gay movie called Brokeback Mountain is “gay.” Critic after critic has enthused that the film is at heart about “two people in love” who “just happen to be men.”

Yeah, right. Tell it to Antonin Scalia!

“The magnificent thing, though,” notes novelist Rick Moody (hardly a disinterested party, given that it was Lee who brought his suburban-angst tale The Ice Storm to the screen), also writing in The Guardian, “that happens . . . during the unraveling marriages of these two men, as the film hastens toward its heart-rending completion, is that you stop thinking of these men as men, or gay men, or whatever, and you start thinking about them only as human beings, people who long for something, for some kind of union they are never likely to have.”

In the immortal words of my favorite drag queen, Bugs Bunny, “Oh, Prunella!”