brokeback/SOTU

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 11:17:57PM -0500, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> Maybe it had something to do with "Brokeback Mountain" getting all of
> those Oscar nominations earlier today, but the emerging sense of
> "brokeback" meaning 'homosocial' (or whatever) showed up in at least
> two political blogs on the State of the Union address.

I was meaning to mention that I heard a natural use of
_brokeback_ in the wild the other day.  The relevant sentence
was along the lines of "He got a Hummer? That's so
brokeback!". On further questioning, the speaker said that it
was used in reference to things that are so exaggeratedly
masculine as to call into question the sexuality of the man
involved. Thus a man driving a minivan wouldn't be brokeback,
but a man driving a Hummer would be. Speaker was a New York-
raised late-30s heterosexual man, who hadn't seen the film.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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