I'm chic? I'm trendy? I thought I was just me.

Who knew that it was the year of the gay? All you had to do was look at the Golden Globes. From Brokeback Mountain to Capote to Transamerica, American cinema is gay, gay, gay. And if the movies are, by extension, a reflection of our culture, what does that say about the world we live in? Now I'm not ungrateful, I love the attention. I mean "gay" is the new "straight". But by reducing these films to the sexual orientations of their protagonists aren't we taking an enormous step backwards? What I admire about Brokeback Mountain is that it is extraordinary in its ordinariness. It is, at its core, a pure love story and one that we have seen and heard countless times. Romeo and Juliet, anyone? Capote, almost shockingly, avoids some of the more scurrilous facts of the main character's life and is quite vague about his relationship with one of the murderers he wrote about in In Cold Blood. Instead, the film focuses on the arrogance and narcissism that was such a huge destructive force in Capote's life. While I have not seen Transamerica, to equate transexuality with homosexuality implies a similarity where none exists and marginalizes two groups even further than they already have been. How far have we really come? I just don't want people to lose sight of these stories as a whole by reducing them to buzz words and sound bytes. If that continues to be the case, then surely I will go the way of gaucho pants and jelly shoes.