Ang Lee's next

It turns out Ang Lee's making another "gay movie." I'm thrilled to hear this, because Lee's movies about gay men are never simply "gay movies." He's interested in characters shaped by multiple pressures and influences.

This is what made his breakthrough feature, The Wedding Banquet, so exceptional. Though its plot and humor was largely driven by gay-related family pressures and immigration limbo, its gay characters weren't flamboyant stereotypes and their world felt real, not like a gay-ghetto bubble or a hell of social ostracism. Wai-Tung Gao, the gay immigrant who marries a woman in a scheme to please their parents and the government, seemed simultaneously authentically gay, fully male, fundamentally Chinese, and pragmatically American. The movie's other characters, including the non-gay ones, were drawn with similar sympathy and complexity.

There are other examples throughout Lee's career of these multiply influenced characters, but to fast-forward to his second overtly gay story, Brokeback Mountain, again the protagonists are multifaceted. It's not just that Ennis and Jack aren't stereotypical gays, either effeminate or self-consciously masculine, but that they are fully shaped by all their circumstances, including location, upbringing, historical era, and sexual orientation.

So I can't wait to see what Lee does with Taking Woodstock, the story of the (gay) town official in Bethel, New York, who approved the permit for the 1969 event. Not reading the book first on this one.