By Alex Maravillas

Arts Assistant Editor

“Once upon a time, there was a little boy who always wanted to love another little boy. One day, he finally found that love and it was wonderful. You cry and you cry until you think you can’t cry anymore, and then you cry some more. Not only for yourself and Felix, but for all the little boys who finally found their other little boys they wanted all their lives now that they’re men.”

Matt Bomer had an invigorating and revelatory performance in “The Normal Heart”, losing about 40 pounds to play the character Felix Turner. Turner reported for The New York Times who failed to resist to the demise of AIDS. The extremely surprising impressive character development earned Bomer a Critics Choice Television Award, a Golden Globe and an Emmy Award nomination.

Homophobia pulverized “The Normal Heart” at the Emmys. The same anti-gay agitations that incapacitated “Brokeback Mountain” at the Oscars gave the film a disadvantage. Ryan Murphy’s HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play about the happening days of AIDS before the usual time was one of last season’s most praised enthusiastically and publicly telefilms.

Both the play and the HBO film looked at the New York crisis through writer Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) who was more adamant about the issue in comparison to his lover, Turner (Bomer).  The two struggled to form a group to raise awareness about the disease, constantly arguing about how to confront this problem. Other talents included Joe Mantello, Alfred Molina and Jim Parsons. In June, it won Best TV Movie at the Critics’ Choice Awards. Matt Bomer took the award of Best Supporting Actor in a movie or television drama the same night.

Unceasingly, the film had the tendency to remind one of “Brokeback Mountain,” which lost at the Oscars in 1996. Losing all its acting bids, it won Direction for Ang Lee and Screenplay for Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. However, the film lost the Best Picture. “The Normal Heart” similarly lost all its acting bids, but in a reverse change in condition. It lost in the Direction and Screenplay categories, yet still won Best Television Movie.

The film’s gay sexual content kept the Emmy voters from fully embracing it, in my opinion.  “The Normal Heart” won Best Television Movie, so it wouldn’t get in a competition in which the losing side failed to score. It opened up voters to charges of homophobia. “The Normal Heart” simply lost its other bids to a superior movie/mini-series, BBC’s “Sherlock Holmes”.

“The Normal Heart” had a backstory that evoked attention. The full standing ovation that the ailing, 79-year-old Kramer would’ve received if he had won the Screenplay Emmy, not only for his writing but his nearly 30-year fight to get his story on screen. A Bomer victory would’ve also made history: He could’ve been the first openly gay actor to win an Emmy for playing a gay role. By contrast, straight actors are cited for their “bravery” and win Emmys for playing gay (i.e., Michael Douglas as Liberace in ”Behind the Candelabra”) or Oscars (i.e., Tom Hanks in ”Philadelphia”). Does Hollywood assume that it’s not really award-worthy for out actors to play gay roles?