Has America Passed the Brokeback Test?

It's a year where the Academy Awards are celebrating movies that openly embrace hot button social issues: a shocking relationship between two men, racial conflict, not to mention the questioning of all kinds of sexual taboos. The movies themselves are critical and box office hits, resulting in a slew of Oscar nominations.

Yup, 1967 was quite a year, no?

You thought I meant this year's Academy Awards. The confusion is understandable as the similarities are striking. Both 1967's Best Picture winner, In the Heat of the Night, and Brokeback Mountain have much in common. Both are about relationships rarely portrayed between two men: In the Heat of the Night is about the relationship between a white, southern sheriff, and a black detective from the north, while Brokeback tells of the passionate love between two men in rural America.

Both were adapted from books, and each was considered risky to film and likely to perform less than stellar at the box office.

Add in two more Best Picture nominees from 1967, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which addressed interracial marriage, and The Graduate, which broke more sexual taboos, and the parallels between 2005 and 1967 grow even greater. Like Brokeback Mountain, Crash, and Transamerica, both Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night ask moviegoers a question: are you open-minded enough to see a movie that directly confronts the pressing social issues of the day?

The answer in 1967 was an emphatic yes. In the Heat of the Night was a surprising success, earning $25 million at the box office (in today's dollars, that translates roughly to $135,000,000). The movie was a critical success as well, earning rave reviews, and five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rod Steiger.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, meanwhile, earned twice as much as In the Heat of the Night ($56 million in 1967/$309 million in current dollars), though it wasn't as critically successful, receiving a fair number of bad reviews, and winning only two Oscars out of its ten nominations. The movie nonetheless touched a cultural nerve addressing as it did interracial marriage.

In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner were both controversial films. The makers of In the Heat of the Night deemed it unsafe to actually film their movie in the south, filming instead in Sparta, Illinois. In fact, Sidney Poitier felt so uncomfortable in the south that director Norman Jewison all but had to drag the actor to Tennessee for four days of filming.

Poitier's apprehension was understandable. Lynchings still occurred in some places below the Mason-Dixon line and, when younger, Poitier had been chased by a group of white men while driving in the south.

So, too, controversy has swirled around Brokeback Mountain. While the movie was filmed in more tolerant Canada for financial reasons, many citizens of Wyoming are incensed to even have the movie set in the “Cowboy State.” Especially irate are some citizens of Riverton, Wyoming, at least a few of whom don't even believe there is such a creature as a gay cowboy.

As happened with one of Poitier's early films, The Defiant Ones, which theaters in Alabama refused to show, theaters in Utah, Washington State, and Australia also refused to book Brokeback Mountain. Meanwhile, religious conservatives howl that the movie is an assault on America's morals, a sneak-attack launched by liberal Hollywood to trick decent folks into accepting homosexuality under the guise of a doomed romance.

They see further proof of Hollywood's depravity in the nominations given to both the gay-themed Capote and Felicity Huffman's performance as a transgendered woman in Transamerica.

As with Brokeback Mountain, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner arrived at a time rife with battles over the rights of a minority group. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 had passed only two years before In the Heat of the Night premiered. Race riots still rocked the country, as would the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

And 1967 itself marked the Supreme Court's historic decision in the case of Loving vs the State of Virginia that finally did away with anti-miscegenation laws once and for all. It was only two years earlier that Virginia judge Leon Bazile sentenced a married interracial couple to jail, writing:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Today gays and lesbians face similarly tumultuous times. It was only two years ago that the Supreme Court overturned their earlier notorious Bowers vs Hardwick decision that criminalized gay sex. We now have civil unions in Vermont and Connecticut and same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. And Washington state just became the 17th to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.

On the other hand, nineteen states have amended their constitutions to ban same-sex marriage and more intend to do the same this year. The US Senate plans to vote this spring on legislation that would also amend the US constitution to forbid gays and lesbians from marrying. Other pending legislation around the country would ban gay adoptions, block gay/straight alliances in high schools, and forbid governments from extending any domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples.

Rhetoric like that of the judge above sounds familiar to most every gay man and lesbian in the country, as religious conservatives such as Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson denounce us at every turn. They boycott gay-related television shows and events, and turn out their base to support homophobic politicians at the ballot box.

Will Brokeback Mountain herald the same sort of social change that followed the success of In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?