The Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has always had an unusually generous working definition of queer film, and that's never been more true than with this year's festival. Spurred in part, according to artistic director Ray Murray, by an upsurge in the quality of lesbian- and transgender-themed features (and an almost-complete absence of Hollywood-financed, up-the-middle romantic comedies), this year's crop is a particularly diverse one that reflects not just the continuing broadening of cinematic options but an increasingly less doctrinaire attitude to what is and isn't "gay enough."

"I love the idea of having wider rules of what is and isn't a gay film," Murray says. "That's what I love about not having a screening committee." While festivals like San Francisco's and L.A.'s pass their films through screening committees that can be notoriously inflexible, Philadelphia's fest remains as idiosyncratic and individualistic as ever. Take Hell House, one of this year's entries, a documentary look at the fundamentalist Christian house of horrors staged each year outside Dallas. The film contains only a handful of explicit references to homosexuality, including one planner's vaguely panicked insistence that the collection of tableaux demonstrating the damning consequences of everything from going to raves to drinking and driving not include a scene set in a lesbian bar. But there's no question that queer audiences will be familiar with the Bible-born bigotry on display, and with the blanket presumption of uniformity that so many come to places like Philadelphia to escape.

Movies that challenge a static definition of what is and isn't queer are all over this year's festival. Take Bob & Rose, the latest six-part series from Queer as Folk creator Russell Davies (interview by David Warner on p. 16). After stirring up controversy with his unapologetic depiction of the relationship between a man and a 15-year-old boy, Davies has again created a multi-part series with another controversial relationship at its center: this one between a gay man and a straight woman. Tim McMurtry's I Remember Mother tells the tale of the surprisingly cozy relationship between a 75-year-old drag queen and the town of New Hope, in the process addressing the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between gay men and the transgender community. (McMurtry is interviewed on p. 16.)

Or take this year's honorees, to be presented with the festival's Artistic Achievement Awards. On the one hand, there's Udo Kier, whose recent work in Hollywood and elsewhere is characterized by a flair for the macabre and the outlandish. And on the other, Jennifer Tilly, a kind of walking camp archetype who's gotten it on with Gina Gershon and a homicidal doll. You might be able to fit both under some definition of "queer cinema," but it'd have to be a pretty broad definition.

Then, there's The Cockettes' trip down memory lane. A troupe of sexually liberated San Franciscans who staged outrageous drag extravaganzas as the '60s turned into the '70s, the group may have been lambasted by Warhol's immaculate transstarlets for their lack of polish, but in retrospect, its bearded transvestites and female drag queens look like harbingers of gender mobility. Recalls one, when you go the circus and look at the bearded lady, "You never think that the beard might be real, but the lady isn't."

"I've rarely gotten any audience saying, ŒWhy did you show that film?'" Murray says. "The audience is surprisingly sophisticated here. It gives us a real opportunity." Of course, Murray admits, gay-male-focused movies, preferably with a catalog photo of a shirtless boytoy, still remain the easiest sellouts, but this year's festival in particular offers much more than beefcake (while still offering plenty of it, not to mention programs devoted to both lesbian and gay porn). But there's no reason you can't nourish the body and the mind, or pick a movie, like the erotic, fractured Lan Yu, that does both. We've done our best to help you sort through the festival's catalog, which this year presents 75 features and more than 100 short films, but being only human, we haven't been able to sample a lot as well, and the varied nature of this year's fest makes the element of chance even more of a factor than usual. But life without risk is a sad, sad thing, moviegoing doubly so. Roll the dice.

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July 12, 2002
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