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Another highly anticipated (although unfortunately less-seen) film featuring a heroic gay lead was the controversial but deeply affecting 9/11 drama United 93, which featured out Broadway star Cheyenne Jackson as gay rugby player Mark Bingham, one of the passengers who was instrumental in downing the hijacked plane. The film itself is a harrowing but deeply respectful account of the events.

While Bingham's character is never explicitly referred to as gay within the context of the film, it wouldn't have made sense if he had been. After all, he is on a plane with a bunch of strangers, and scenes of Bingham being dropped off at the airport by a lover were cut for narrative reasons. (None of the passengers' backstories were developed.) Bingham was portrayed as he should have been: simply as a man whose journey was horribly cut short, and one who showed incredible bravery and resolve in the face of insurmountable odds.

Another notably high-profile flick with a central gay character, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, used gayness as a subversive element to horrify the fans of the very industry that it lampooned: NASCAR racing. In Nights, terminally rednecked racecar driver Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell at his “dumb Bubba” best) and his friends are shocked when an espresso-swilling French driver named Jean Girard (cultural terrorist Sacha Baron Cohen) arrives on the scene. They are downright mortified when they learn that he's not only a good driver, but a homosexual, to boot.

The film's climax hilariously plays off this anxiety and the homophobia in pro sports by having Ricky make out with Jean at the end of the big race in front of millions of fans. Cheap joke? Yeah, probably — but given the subject and the film's target audience, it was also one of the most audacious moments of the year in mainstream film.

Cohen also appeared in the unforgettable Borat as the title character, a clueless, faux-Kazakh reporter who was first created on Cohen's Da Ali G Show. In the film, Borat picks up gay men at a Pride parade and takes them back to his hotel room (when relating the events to a congressman, Borat is shocked to find that the “man who tried to put rubber fist up my ass is homosexual?”), and also wrestles his best friend in the nude in a particularly horrifying sequence. Exposing the world's preconceptions toward homosexuality seems to be one of Cohen's MO's — that and unleashing blazingly irreverent comedy and mocking Madonna, of course.

Gay supporting characters appeared in other major releases as well, from the depressing romantic comedy The Break-Up (which featured a gay-seeming straight guy who sings in an a cappella men's group, and actor Justin Long as a flamboyant gallery receptionist) to the fashion magazine romp The Devil Wears Prada. In the Meryl Streep flick, Stanley Tucci plays a less-gay-acting-than-expected art director, although considering that he has no personal life to speak of, he may as well be straight.

Then there was the sadistic ugly-Americans-on-tour horror film Hostel, which featured both a queer villain and a surprisingly — and perhaps unintentionally — tender subplot about a likely-gay teen. The teen, of course, is brutally murdered, but at least his is the only death not treated as a joke.

In fact, the horror movies of 2006 mostly got it right when it came to gay representation — that is, if you consider any character introduced solely to die horribly later on to be “representation.” Teen slasher flick See No Evil broke genre convention by featuring a lesbian heroine, and both the terrifying British film The Descent and the American horror-comedy Slither featured lesbian or bisexual supporting characters.

Hotly anticipated preordained cult movie Snakes on a Plane seemed to present a heroic gay character for most of the movie, but the joke at the end was that he was straight after all. The twist downgraded the character to another gay-seeming one-note joke. To see “gay-seeming” taken to new heights, you really had to see The Covenant, which owes more to David DeCoteau's brand of hot-boys-in-underwear thriller (The Brotherhood, Voodoo Academy) than The Covenant's filmmakers probably care to admit.

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