"Brokeback" named Hollywood word of the year

[Jonathan Lighter]

It all calls to mind a highly comic moment once immortalized in brief verse. One evening, in the Soudanese capital of Khartoum, a "closeted" chap of the sort you describe met a young lady who, it soon developed to his chagrin, was secretly a devotee of the fictional Bilitis.  After a satisfactory interval of socializing, the two repaired to the chap's room where - and here is where the true humour begins - they fell into a wrangle concerning exactly how the rest of the evening should progress !

  Quite amusing, what ?

  JL


Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "Brokeback" named Hollywood word of the year
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There was an article in a recent N. Y. Times about "Brokeback
marriages", which doesn't involve the descriptive adjective
"brokeback" per se, but is a direct reference to the kind of marriage
depicted in the movie: closeted gay man + unaware straight woman.
Judging from other recent hits, this has come to be used quite widely
for the same (not particularly new) phenomenon. (The article cited
the marriages of, inter al., Oscar and Constance Wilde, Cole and
Linda Porter, Rock Hudson & Phyllis Gates, and Mr. and Mrs. James
(the Gay-American Governor) McGreevey, although at least some of
these relationships involved not necessarily unaware women--the
Porters for one.)

Larry

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