Wives and Lovers at the Academy Awards : Gay rights: Hanks showed the Holocaust of homophobia.

Tom Hanks, who won this year’s Oscar for best actor, said the simple things we have waited for so long for someone in the public eye to say. Accepting his award for his portrayal of a person with AIDS in “Philadelphia,” Hanks talked about his lover and their children; he hoped, he said, that his children had role models and friends as meaningful to them as his own had been to him, adding that he wouldn’t be receiving the award but for the inspiration of two particular gay men.

Most powerfully, he referred to his “lover” and how much his lover meant to him, as 1 billion people saw his lover--a woman to whom he is married, because heterosexual lovers are allowed to be married in this country.

What is so important about this is that Hanks realizes that his own privileges as an American citizen don’t mean much if they are denied to others for reasons that have nothing to do with their conduct and everything to do with senseless and unconstitutional prejudice against them. When he said lover and could have said wife , lots of people must have said “I didn’t know he was gay” or “I thought he was married.” By daring to put himself in our shoes, Hanks showed what citizenship in a democracy means. He also italicized for us all what being gay means in civic terms. It means you can be taxed but not married; it means you can be some of everyone’s best friends, but not their equals; it means you are the exception to equality under the law.

Hanks’ courageous candor came as especially meaningful in an evening that celebrated the example of “Schindler’s List.” Hanks acted upon the lesson of “Schindler’s” for us all. Lest this seem a crazy analogy--Schindler’s extraordinary heroism amid the quintessential horror of 20th-Century history to Hanks being decent with regard to gays in his acceptance speech--consider two things. One is that Hanks bore witness against an injustice that does kill and maim and he did it by making himself one with the victims of this prejudice and violence.

Second, there are many people whose agendas include the devastation of gays. Groups as otherwise disparate as the Nation of Islam, orthodox Jews and right-wing Christians agree about lesbians and gay men. Homophobia is a continuation of the Holocaust, and remains universally practiced and infrequently denounced.