Gay men love the Oscars. But the Oscars haven’t always shown the same love back.

It’s been more than 20 years since “Brokeback Mountain,” after a charmed precursor season, lost the best picture trophy to “Crash,” and though there have been breakthroughs since then — “Moonlight,” to name the most famous of them — there still hasn’t been an out gay best actor winner.

That could well change this year, though. Among the many narratives coalescing around the coming Academy Awards, it’s gone somewhat underdiscussed that this promises to be a season more deeply rooted in the gay experience than any in memory. “Elsinore,” led by Andrew Scott, is a major contender; so is “La Bola Negra,” about generations of Spanish gay men living through the turbulence of history. “Club Kid,” which Jordan Firstman wrote, directed and stars in, is a moving coming-of-age story in which its protagonist’s sexuality is central to the story; “Artificial,” dominated as it is by an utterly chilling Andrew Garfield performance, depicts a gay tech CEO as a manipulator who’ll never grow up.

These films exist in a post-”Heated Rivalry” moment during which audiences seem newly open to queer stories. And just as that TV series used a provocative premise to explore the tricky emotional terrain of intimacy and the closet, so do these films launch into surprising directions, showing many different sides of the gay experience.

Take director Simon Stone’s “Elsinore,” set during the AIDS crisis. Scott plays the real-life actor Ian Charleson, who’d courted fame with appearances in “Chariots of Fire” and “Gandhi” and who remains in the closet so as to preserve his career prospects. At one point, he gets in an argument with an early collaborator, the director Derek Jarman (David Dawson), who insists that it’s Charleson’s responsibility to live an open life — so that homosexuality, and AIDS, might be something more than an abstraction for the straight world. It’s a knotty, complicated argument, and one waged between gay guys who fight like gay guys: Savage wit and deep wells of sympathy in the midst of rancor braid together as they lash at one another. They know precisely how to hurt one another, because they’ve absorbed those same hurts themselves, too.

We’re only 12 years removed from “Dallas Buyers Club,” which situated a flawed but ultimately virtuous straight man — with a trans woman existing in supportive counterpoint — at the center of its AIDS narrative. Now, the story is specifically and defiantly gay, and Scott is allowed not merely to suffer (though he does mightily) but to experience lust and joy, too. Well before Charleson takes the stage as Hamlet — the performance, delivered in the actor’s final days of life, that gives the movie its title — we understand his juicy love of repartee and his capacity for intimacy and his depth of feeling as traits on their own terms, and as fundamentally tied to his sexuality.

Firstman’s “Club Kid” similarly allows its leading man to delve into a character who is not solely defined by his sexuality but for whom being gay is intrisic — a core fact about who he is. Firstman’s character Peter must mature quickly when he discovers he has a young child (played by Reggie Absolom) whom he now must raise; doing so means leaving behind both the queer nightlife scene of which he’s a part and a carefully, subtly drawn self-loathing. With admirable specificity, the movie depicts Peter’s experience of queer nightlife without ever condescending to a straight audience or doing too much work to explain.

“Club Kid” is very specifically about a moment in which gratification — whether that comes in the form of party drugs or every obscure video clip in history available via smartphone — has become numbing; this is true for all of us, surely, but is so clearly drawn from experience that it cannot help but feel like a gay story in which every audience member might see themselves. That parenthood is something Peter had grown up seeing himself necessarily ineligible for is itself a peak millennial-gay experience, and we watch him reframe his expectations of what adulthood might look like.

“La Bola Negra,” too, has a contemporary thread, as Carlos González plays a late-2010s historian attempting to suss out the relevance of a gay-themed Federico García Lorca play he inherits. The quest resonates with two other plot threads, including a narrative about the tender, glancing relationship between two soldiers on opposing sides of the Spanish Civil War (Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau). Its directors, Los Javis, are two gay men who were a romantic couple (they broke up during production) and will likely be charming, forthright ambassadors for the film up until the Oscars — at which “La Bola Negra,” given its reception at Cannes and in limited release so far, may well reap major nominations.

Co-director Javier Calvo recently told Variety that he refused to simplify the film’s narrative for a straight audience: “I don’t like movies that treat me like I’m dumb. The audience is smart enough. When I see ‘Chernobyl,’ I maybe don’t get some nuclear stuff, but I’m in it. In the gay world — no difference.”

Forget “Dallas Buyers Club” — Oscar movies have also come a long way since the way audiences received “Brokeback Mountain.” That 2005 film, which won honor after honor before falling just short of best picture, was a legitimate boundary-shatterer. It also was marketed and discussed as a “universal” love story, one that anyone could find resonance within. We remember, now, the film for the specificity of its depiction of gay love and of the pain of the closet, but, in its moment, its creative team had to very carefully discuss it in order to avoid offending anyone. (Given that it lost the top prize, maybe this was a wasted effort.)

It’s hard to imagine Los Javis or Jordan Firstman or Andrew Scott attempting to do a similar public relations dance. Their films are utterly themselves, inextricably related to the queer experiences at their respective centers. So, too, is one more film by a gay director: Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial,” about rise of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, once again made me feel as if secrets were being spilled. These ones, though, weren’t about gay love or camaraderie; they were about the ways gay men, specifically, can be evil.

As performed by Andrew Garfield (who is, in real life, dating “Artificial” co-star Monica Barbaro, but who clearly understood his role), Altman is a practiced manipulator who uses aggressive, insinuating intimacy and pleas for sympathy to subdue skeptics. We get glimpses of a Norman Bates-adjacent closeness with his mother, whom he calls weeping, and of his ostentatiously hammy disregard for his perceived inferiors, guzzling a green smoothie as he pointedly ignores them, when he feels scorned. Within his stammering exterior — one we come to see as a vain and unconvincing performance of humility — lies a hot coil of rage, one that leads him not to care if the technology he’s shepherding might destroy the world.

Who knows what the future holds for this performance at the Oscars — after Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name” got Timothée Chalamet his first career nomination for his role as a confused queer teen, the Academy has not responded to the Italian director’s subsequent provocations like “Queer” (about a gay man) and “Challengers” (about a thoroughly modern guy-guy-girl throuple, of sorts). But the performance is striking, memorable and important. Gay men watching all have had a terrible night out with some Sam Altman or another — this is the most intriguing gay, and intriguingly gay, villain since Tom Ripley. And while it may not win a GLAAD Award for positive representation, “Artificial” represents part of the same leap forward as do the other gay films this season. Filmmakers are being refreshingly candid about all the aspects of gay life: The way we love, the way we party, the way we can — if having taken the wrong lessons from growing up an outsider — climb the corporate ladder evilly. And cinema feels richer with all these different versions of gay life in it.