The revelation (or reiteration—he's said it before) that Moore isn't gay doesn't make his speech less moving. It's inspiring that he overcame suicidal depression, regardless of its cause. The world would be better if future awards champs took his advice to heart and used their platform to do good. Queer kids especially could benefit from his message, given that suicide rates are higher among them.

But knowing that he's straight, and knowing the primary controversy surrounding The Imitation Game has been about its minimization of the gay experience, makes Moore's Oscars moment a somewhat strange one. In fact, it's striking how much his speech is decidedly not aimed at gay people, even though it spoke out against suicide by invoking the name of a man whose suicide was likely related to his sexuality and at a time when LGBT suicide is a well-publicized problem.

"Stay weird" isn't advice that would have helped Turing, and as Slate's June Thomas and J. Bryan Lowder have pointed out, the challenges for queer people are a lot bigger than the mere fact that they feel different. Persecution and internal anxieties play a role; when you're raised in a homophobic society, the idea of ever finding same-sex companionship can seem hopeless or even frightening. "Thinking of homosexuality (or bisexuality or transgenderism) as weird is, in a way, precisely the problem," Lowder writes. "There’s nothing weird about these natural and normal ways of being human, and getting to a point where straight people understand that on a fundamental level should be the goal. "

Movies about LGBT people often help shed light on what it's like to be queer, but one of the most pervasive knocks against The Imitation Game was that it didn’t really do that. As portrayed in the film, Turing initiates a sham marriage not out of his own need to pass as straight, but to keep a star scientist working for him. In flashbacks, viewers learn he’d had an intense childhood friendship that ended sadly, but though the audience is meant to assume Turing had romantic feelings for another boy, there’s really nothing gay about the plot line; why wouldn’t Turing develop an admiration for the only person who was nice to him at school? In the movie’s framing story, the police interrogate and then punishing Turing for being gay, but viewers learn nothing about the actual relationships or desires that led to that persecution. Note that these storytelling decisions were all from the script—in other words, they were Moore's.

The irony is that the awards-season campaign for The Imitation Game doubled as a gay-rights campaign, with the Weinstein Company supporting a petition asking the British government to pardon 49,000 men prosecuted for homosexuality. That’s a worthy cause, but many saw the film's Oscars slogan—“Honor the man. Honor the film.”—as transparently opportunistic, using political righteousness to help win trophies. If anyone has benefited from the campaign so far, it's Moore. He didn't mention it in the speech.

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