10 Gay Secrets About the 2013 Academy Awards

This year's Academy Award nominees have their own share of gay backstory, if not in terms of orientation, then in history. Many of the actors have formerly played gay roles and some films even had gay characters or situations in them.

Let's take a quick peek at the nominees to see which are gay and which have only played that way.

Director Ang Lee was nominated for his trippy spiritual allegory Life of Pi. Yet, he acheived gay notoreity for two of his earlier contributions, the 1993 comedy The Wedding Banquet and of course 2005's Brokeback Mountain.

You should watch The Wedding Banquet (which got nominated for Best Foreign Film) and read the Annie Proulx short story Brokeback Mountain to enjoy all the rich language and backstory missing from Lee's adaptation.

EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this story mistakenly identified Ang Lee as openly gay. He is not.

The chameleon-like Phillip Seymour Hoffman played an L. Ron Hubbard-esque cult leader in this year's artsy drama The Master. But in 2005, he transformed into the light-voiced gay author Truman Capote who faced his own demons while writing In Cold Blood.

It wasn't an amazing movie, but it was definitely a troubling one in which Hoffman played a charming, but calculating literary celebrity.

In his role as Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Day Lewis did not explore the former president's rumored homosexuality. But in the 1985 British dramedy My Beautiful Laundrette, Lewis did explore gay love as a street punk who falls for a Pakastani laundromat owner.

Things gets sudsy near the end of the film, in a good way.

Long before Hugh Jackman (aka Wolverine) stole a loaf of bread as Jean Valjean in the movie musical Les Miserables, he played the lead role in the rapturously gay Broadway musical The Boy From Oz.

He played the role so well that gay rumors have followed him ever since, though his wife just laughs them off — lucky her.

A few years before Joaquin Phoenix appeared in The Master, he grew a beard, appeared on David Letterman and incoherently declared his intention to quit acting and pursue a hip-hop career.

The completely transparent stunt was turned into a completely masturbatory "documentary" called I'm Still Here that contains "more male frontal nudity than you’d find in some gay porn films"... so there's that.

Yes, yes... the real-life Abraham Lincoln might have been gay or bi or whatever, but we know for a fact that the screenwriter for the film Lincoln is definitely gay.

His name is Tony Kushner and he also wrote Angels in America, a Pulitzer-prize winning play that is a must-read for anyone interested in HIV, closeted Mormons, theater or the gay imagination.

Whether or not Para-Norman scores an Academy Award, it still scored a huge first by presenting an opnely gay and likable jock named Mitch (at center) — his inclusion was a landmark achievement for gay visibility in children's animated movies.

This documentary about ACT-UP — the 90s-era organization that fought for access to AIDS medication — is basically the East coast counterpart to the 2010 documentary We Were Here.

Both should be required viewing for anyone under 35.

The visual effects in this sci-fi thriller include a very phallic snake that shoves itself none-to-subtly into a man's mouth... presumably to lay eggs? Sounds familiar.

But in the name of gender equality, the film also features a frightening beast lovingly called "Super Vagina" — she's a real man eater!

Amid the rapid-fire jokes made throughout Disney's Brave, you probably missed the raven's gay aside about a prince who looked good in tight pants.

That doesn't make the raven gay per se, but it certainly means that he spent a second admiring a guy's butt... a first-time admission for a male Disney cartoon character.