Is Gay(ism) Slowly but Surely Taking Over? Is it the New Black in Entertainment?
One of the most volatile and important issues facing the society today is the question of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle. We cannot (however much we want to) duck this question. Most recent events serve to thrust this question to the front and center of showbiz.
And now that the awards season reached its culmination earlier today with the celebration of the 86th Academy Awards, it’s time to zero in on the homosexuality issue as far as the showbiz scene is concerned.
Well, after the climax of Oscar night I can only conclude that gay is the new black.
This award season can be best summarized as season for “gay for pay” actors/ artists. Notably, it all started with the announcement of the Oscar nominations where a nomination went to “Dallas Buyers Club” something that gave entertainment reporters something to write about especially the Huffington Post that urged the Academy not to award the movie nominated in Best Writing category.
This is a film in which the hero of the AIDS movement is a straight bigot who helps educate all of the people he once despised about how to treat themselves and fight the system. In its haste it almost entirely erases the real saints of that fight: the men and women of the LGBT community who saved their own lives.
In accord that the movie is not from “our time”, it is in my strong belief the storyline denied this movie an academy award.
It had already been prejudiced as “a movie from another time, one that tiptoed around that story with anxiety hence why the Oscars didn’t make the mistake of treating it like a movie that’s right for the time we live in now.
In contrast however, Matthew McConaughey won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in “Dallas Buyers Club” as a homophobic, rodeo-loving Texan who contracts AIDS and becomes an unlikely savior for gay patients and drug addicts desperate for treatment.
Before the Oscars, James Franco, Cate Blanchett and Matthew McConaughey were singled out for their ‘gay’ performances among others in January, by the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association (GALECA) for being LGBT-Centric. Meanwhile, “12 Years a Slave” garnered ‘Best Film of the Year’.
Meanwhile, Jared Leto was awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Supporting Actor award. Leto, who plays a transgender woman afflicted by AIDS in “Dallas Buyers Club”, already won a Golden Globe for his performance. And earlier this morning he won an Oscar as the Best Supporting Actor.
To further demonstrate how gay is the new black, the 2014 Grammys put the icing on the cake.
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis took home the Grammy for Best New Artist but their biggest moment may have been bringing dozens of gay, straight and multiracial couples together to get married live during the 56th Grammy Awards. During the duo’s song “Same Love,” which addresses the fight for same sex marriage, Queen Latifah officiated.
Opinion formers argued that had ‘Same Love’ won ‘Song of the Year,’ the night could have caught the zeitgeist, and achieved a coherence, that would have been stirring.
Macklemore however has in the past denied that he’s gay but he has two gay uncles and grew up around committed gay relationships that could not be legalized (as he does in ‘Same Love’).
Well, 2014 will be remembered as the year the Grammys went gay…sort of.
