Let's put to bed the old canard that playing gay is career suicide. Consider that Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, Felicity Huffman in Transamerica, and Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall in Brokeback Mountain are all up for awards at this Sunday's red-carpeted love fest. The Oscars have rarely been so queer, but relative to the zeitgeist, the Academy has never been particularly homophobic. In fact, it has been more generous to actors playing overt or covert gay than actors who aren't white or don't speak English. Below is a subjective and incomplete history of gay Oscar, touching on the bi, the gay-friendly and -unfriendly, the tranny, the proverbial man-in-a-dress, and the outright purple. Every performance cited here is a winner or nominee.

Teasing gay subtext out of first Oscared performances is an exercise in near-futility. In the early 1930s, Marie Dressler was the butch's butch in Min and Bill, and George Arliss was the fop's fop in Disraeli, but to impose homosexuality on them is a stretch only the most stouthearted could attempt. A much easier claim is made for a cross-dressing Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, with her famous woman-on-woman buss in a smoky cafe. Mischa Auer's simian interloper in My Man Godfrey comes shrink-wrapped in sexual ambiguity, as does Leslie Howard's pre-My Fair Lady Henry Higgins in Pygmalion.

It was not until the 1940s that filmmakers and performers were clever enough to imply sexual deviance while passing the scrutiny of the Production Code. We start the decade with Rebecca's Judith Anderson fingering her mistress' skivvies. In The Great Lie, Mary Astor's aversion to pregnancy, rejection of men, and singular devotion to her piano suggests a woman driven as much by Sapphic denial as art. But the ultimate 1940s lavender screen icon is Clifton Webb, who earned not one, not two, but three nominations for playing as gay as the era would allow. The first came for his gossip columnist in Laura. His effete hanger-on in The Razor's Edge is the prototype for today's over-aged circuit queen. Sitting Pretty was his most spectacular display of gay innuendo, as a never-married, multitalented mystery man storming the suburbs to teach lunk-headed heterosexuals a thing or two about parenting. Even his three character names sound queer, queer, and queer: Waldo Lydecker, Elliott Templeton, and Lynn Belvedere.

Gay Oscar grew less coy in the 1950s. Who could forget Hope Emerson's diesel truck of a prison matron in Caged harassing "cute new trick" Eleanor Parker? George Sanders and Ann Baxter in All About Eve are so fully drawn that homosexual undercurrents may be read or ignored as chosen. Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause and Russ Tamblyn in Peyton Place were both nominated for playing sissies.

Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. Photo: Kimberly French

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is murky, since the censors demanded that the frank talk in the stage original be expurgated until Paul Newman's indifference to a feral Elizabeth Taylor made little sense. Three from 1959 assert themselves: Charlton Heston has love light in his eyes for special friend Messala in Ben-Hur. Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like it Hot is but one boat ride away from same-sex marriage. The homosexuality of the unseen Sebastian Venable gave Suddenly, Last Summer its dramatic propulsion, with Taylor and Katharine Hepburn chewing every stick of scenery for a 10-mile radius.

Euro vision

The 1960s were a mixed bag. There was the rise of standard-brand Euro fag-hags Leslie Caron (The L-Shaped Room ) and Julie Christie (Darling ). A highly emotive Fay Bainter of The Children's Hour reacted to lesbian rumors as if she were eyewitness to the Battle of Antietam. In Exodus, Sal Mineo (again) screams, "They used me — like a woman!" and the meaning is incontrovertible. Beautiful young Terence Stamp gave sailors the itch in Billy Budd. Estelle Parsons was a small-town lesbian in Rachel, Rachel with a closet so big she couldn't find the door, much less open it. Ditto the repressed Grayson Hall in The Night of the Iguana. Daniel Massey played Noel Coward in Star!, a movie that somehow managed to take all the fun out of being Noel Coward. Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy are often interpreted as reluctant mates, in spirit if not in flesh.

For gay subtextual exuberance, nothing surpasses the Best Actor race of 1964. Peter Sellars' President in Dr. Strangelove was reportedly gay in early script drafts. Peter O'Toole's Henry II and Richard Burton's Becket were played as lovers, right down to a cozy scene under the covers. Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek is so hypermasculine that revisionists may want to double-check his dance on the beach with a young male protégé. The winner that year, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, was a showtune-singing bachelor mama's boy who lived with a man and treated Eliza Doolittle with the casual disregard of a throw pillow.

The 1970s knocked down all road-blocks for full-on explorations of sexual deviance. Peter Finch thought of England during a lusty homosexual lip-lock in Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Jeff Bridges donned wig, falsies, and a mini-skirt for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and Valerie Perrine swung both ways in Lenny. In Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino loved Chris Sarandon so much that he robbed a bank to pay for his betrothed's sex-reassignment surgery. Marcello Mastroianni played retro as an unhappy, lonely gay man in A Special Day. Bette Midler in The Rose was ostensibly bisexual, though she looked like she was ready to bring up lunch in her one scene with a woman.

The 70s were Oscar's Golden Age for women who loved men who loved men: Glenda Jackson in Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Cloris Leachman in The Last Picture Show, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, and Maggie Smith in California Suite. We didn't see their likes again until Joan Cusack in In & Out, Julianne Moore in Far from Heaven, and this year's Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain.

Supposedly daring glances at sexuality and gender were the rage in the early 1980s, but Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange never renounced heterosexuality in Tootsie, and Julie Andrews was an unconvincing androgyne in Victor/Victoria. The latter movie had Robert Preston as a queeny emcee, counterbalancing the lonely-hearted James Coco in Only When I Laugh. Then came John Lithgow's Roberta in The World According to Garp, and two cases of unrequited gay love: Cher in Silkwood, and Tom Courtney in The Dresser. At least William Hurt got laid in Kiss of the Spider Woman before unkind fate stepped in. Not since Bette Midler in The Rose has an actress looked so damn uncomfortable with lesbianism as Whoopi Goldberg did in The Color Purple. Margaret Avery in the same film fared better.

The 1990s gave us Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion, and Stephen Rea and Jaye (she has a penis!) Davidson in The Crying Game. Tom Hanks won Best Actor as the sympathetic AIDS patient in Philadelphia, a movie so politically schematic that it might be mistaken for a PFLAG brochure. Tim Roth played a wicked campster in Rob Roy, while Greg Kinnear was a put-upon puppy in As Good As It Gets. Before he was Gandalf, Ian McKellen was very fine as broken-down film director James Whale in Gods and Monsters. Jude Law did not shy away from homoerotic allure in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The decade finished with Chlo' Sevigny and a transgendered Hillary Swank as lovers in Boys Don't Cry .

The aughts have so far given us Javier Bardem as Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls, and Johnny Depp's fey turn in Pirates of the Caribbean. Nothing compares to 2002's The Hours for depressing homo overload. Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, and Ed Harris played dispirited types in varying stages of sexual self-awareness and suicidal temptation. Charlize Theron in Monster set the new standard for Oscar-bound debeautification. And now Transamerica, Capote, and Brokeback Mountain all show up in one year. There is reason to suppose that moviemakers are riding a new wave of maturity on matters of the heart and loins. If strong box-office ensues, expect the good news to get better.