Homosexuality, of course, used to be known as the love that dare not speak its name--until, thanks to the gayification of pop culture, it became the love that wouldn't shut the hell up. Now the man crush (a heterosexual male's feelings of platonic love for another man) and the bromance (when those feelings are reciprocated) are coming out of the closet in a major way. This has been brewing for a while (remember those "I love you, man" Bud Light commercials?), but it reached a high point in the already-classic drunken exchange in last year's Superbad (which also coined bromance), in which Seth tells his buddy, "I just love you. I just wanna go to the rooftops and scream, 'I love my best friend, Evan!'"
The fact that some guys now not only admit to same-sex infatuations without suffering a paralyzing identity crisis but announce them amounts to a seismic cultural shift. Until recently, if a heterosexual dude wanted to reveal something about his inner self, the safe (i.e., non-gay-seeming) option was to take a stand about, say, The Killer versus Hard Boiled. Now he can hold forth about his taste in men.
