Butch Brokeback and the Sundance Mountain

When this Collector's Edition of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was released in 2006, it was almost as if the marketing department was trying to remind us of something.

More Oscars Hoyay (2006)

Hahahaha. Oh, Jon Stewart, how I love you.



The 'gay Westerns montage' was, of course, also a winner - especially the Charlton Heston/Gregory Peck clip.

Oscars Hoyay

At the 2007 Oscars, happily-boyfriended Devil Wears Prada co-stars Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt make me wistfully imagine a world where out gay Hollywood starlets could bring their girlfriends to the Oscars.

Ballet Hoyay

Mikhail Baryshnikov and... actually, I'm not sure who the other guy is. But classical ballet, and dance in general, needs more male/male duets.

Photograph courtesy of sort-of-out lesbian Annie Leibovitz. (As ever, click on the image to enlarge).

The Country Hoyay

It's actually Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand, not Morgan Freeman and Peter Gallagher, who play an old married couple in the revival of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl currently showing on Broadway. (Gallagher plays a hotshot director trying to get Freeman's alcoholic actor back on stage). But, for whatever reason, New York Magazine decided to take a picture of Freeman and Gallagher apparently celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. Hey, I'm not complaining. (Also cute is Gallagher's comment to Freeman in the accompanying interview: "Morgan and I just met, but I feel like I've known you forever.")

The Daily Hoyay Report

I know that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are both happily married heterosexuals in real life. But if they will insist on fake-kissing over a slice of pizza - complete with interlinked pinky fingers and "love is a many-splendoured thing" music playing in the background - then it seems to me they can only expect to wind up on a blog about hoyay:



Actually, the short and delectable Mr. Stewart is something of a one-man hoyay machine, as he can reliably be counted on to flirt with his male Daily Show guests. Then there was the time he showed up at Howard Stern's 'Gay Dance Party' back in 1998 in a marine outfit a la Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. Sadly the video of this Stern episode has been lost to posterity, but a few pictures are extant:



Any true fan of Stewart-Colbert hoyay knows that the best video capturing their fake news/fake love bond is this:



Then, of course, there's Stephen Colbert-Paul Dinello hoyay - but that's a whole other post.

Nip/Tuck Ho/Yay

Nip/Tuck as a show is too dark and disturbing for me, so I've had to follow the hoyaytastic exploits of Dr. Christian Troy and Dr. Sean McNamara - including Christian's "Am I a homosexual?" dream, pictured above - from a distance. If, like me, you don't watch the show, then this video posted on YouTube should help get you up to speed with their relationship:

Young Woman With A Hoyay

If you've ever seen the 1950 jazz drama Young Man With A Horn, you'll know that Lauren Bacall plays a daring-for-the-time subtextual lesbian.

What's really daring for the time, though, is that we (very briefly) get to see her subtextual girlfriend:



Yeah. Not very subtextual, is it?

Wings. And Hoyay.

Have I gone six months into a blog on homoeroticism without mentioning the Oscar-winning 1927 silent film Wings?


Not sure how I managed that.

The Hoyay of the Opera

Oh, Emmy Rossum. You can be my slightly-butch-but-not-really page boy any time you want.


And I will very happily be your Minnie Driver.

One Tree Hoyay

I can't be bothered to watch One Tree Hill since they wrote out their one canonically non-heterosexual character, Anna (Daniella Alonso), so I don't know the particular situation that led to this "hilarious fake-gay spooning!"

But - if for no other reason than that it involves Chad Michael Murray - it is kind of hilarious. And, awww, kind of cute.

Storm Hoyay

Remember that lovely old romance Storm Warning from 1951, where Ginger Rogers and Doris Day fall madly in love? Well, except that the film was actually a dark drama about racism, Day's character is married to a brute, and, oh, all right, you got me - Day and Rogers were playing sisters. But looking at the picture, you can see how I got slightly confused.

The H.O.Y.A.Y.

One of the many disappointing things about the later seasons of The O.C. was the near-squandering of all the Seth/Ryan subtext set up in the first.

But then it's true that when your opening image is this, you don't leave yourself much place to go hoyaywise:


Still, I think we all know that the show would have been better if it had ended on the note proposed in a Newsweek interview by Ben McKenzie (who played Ryan):

Will Ryan pop the question to Marissa?
I've always pushed for the big marriage that the whole entire audience has always seen coming. Ryan and Seth walk down the aisle hand in hand.

Gossip Hoyay

We don't as yet get Gossip Girl over here. But if the rumours I hear concerning the Blair/Serena hoyay are true - and these pictures very strongly seems to indicate that they are - then I may have to consider watching it.

Brideshead Rehoyayed

No-one has ever done hoyay quite like Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the 1981 television mini-series Brideshead Revisited. Really, really, no-one.

Bend It Like Hoyay

I remember the first time I saw this movie poster on the side of a bus. For a moment, my hopes soared so high. Girls in sports clothes! Girls with their arms around each other! Could it be... a lesbian romance? And one of the girls in particular seemed to be cute (a certain Miss Keira Knightley... I hear she went on to do rather well).

Alas, it was not to be... although apparently it would have been, if director Gurinder Chadha hadn't got cold feet at the last moment. But traces of the original architecture of the movie, where Jess and Jules did fall in love, can be seen in the finished product: the moment when Jules first spots Jess in the park, for example, or the moment when one of Jess's relatives glimpses her and the short-haired Jules together, and thinks that they are a couple.

As it is, we have to take the movie for what it is: a heterosexual romance with just a dash of hoyay. But at least it does end with the girls walking off into the sunset... er, football scholarship... with each other.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Hoyay

I'm not sure I've yet found a picture that does justice to the hoyay and general life-partnerishness that was the Matthew Perry/Bradley Whitford pairing on the late, lamented Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

But this shoulder-kiss that Whitford gave Perry on the red carpet is rather cute:


As is this one of Perry reciprocating:


Then there was the man-hugging on Leno (sadly no longer available on YouTube).

Not to mention the quotes from Time:

Perry and Whitford have fantastic chemistry; squabbling but loyal, Matt and Danny are like a long-married couple but with more passion.

And from TelevisionWithoutPity.com:

Danny's just enjoying the pristine sense of calm that comes with sitting in the back of a cab. Matt ambles by and knocks on the roof and says, "We're doing it." Dude, we know. Oh, the show! He means the show.

And from the actors themselves:

Jumping in so quickly after The West Wing, I did sort of feel like I was cheating, but I felt like I was having an affair with Matt [Perry, his Studio 60 costar]. It's more of a masculine man bond. Matt said that we're having a "bromance".

True Hoyay

Credits are in order here. This utterly awesome music video, featuring footage from the 1991 drama True Colors starring James Spader and John Cusack, was created not by me, but by someone called Fayzabeam, who posted it on YouTube. Hopefully she won't mind me posting it here, in tribute both to her editing skills, and to her great taste in music ('Black Velvet' has always been a favourite of mine).

This is the kind of video that, just when I think I have fallen out of love with hoyay, makes me fall back in. The long, lingering, burning stares. The romance that always stops just short of a kiss. I haven't seen the movie, but judging from the footage here, I think it's probably safe to say that Messrs. Spader and Cusack knew what they were doing. Sirs, I salute you. You have created hoyay, and you have made it beautiful.

Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane is a movie that always seems to come up when lesbian subtext is being talked about, so I thought I ought to give it at least a mention here. Actually, the movie seems to me less specifically and strongly lesbian than it does just pervasively and giddily queer all round: has there ever been quite so much cross-dressing in one movie? Calamity dresses like a man, and gets winked at on the streets of Chicago by a girl who (presumably) thinks she is one. A male performer called Francis Fryer does a drag act at the Deadwood bar, for reasons I can't quite remember - and it takes the male audience a while to work out that "she" is actually a he. Even Wild Bill Hickok has to dress up like a squaw after he loses a bet with Calamity.

Everything gets 'straightened' out in the end, of course - but it's true that you could see at least a little hoyay in Calamity's initial admiring and protective attitude towards Katie, their duet 'A Woman's Touch' after moving in together, and - of course - the song 'Secret Love' that Doris belts out at the end, even if she is ostensibly singing about Bill.

Till The End of Time

I've never seen the 1946 movie Till The End of Time, with Guy Madison and Robert Mitchum. But it looks hoyaytastic.