World Wide Words notes the widespread usage of the word “brokeback”.
‘The success of the film Brokeback Mountain, the love story of two ranch hands, has caused “brokeback” to begin to appear in everyday conversation as a near-synonym for “gay”. Jesse Sheidlower, boss of the Oxford English Dictionary’s US operations, reported this week he heard a man say “He got a Hummer? That’s so brokeback!” Naturally, he queried the usage: “The speaker said 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. The speaker was a New York-raised late-30s heterosexual man, who hadn’t seen the film.”
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