While senators debate gay marriage in the most perverse terms, there are blood red depictions of gay life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness onstage for the fourth annual Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival. Artistic directors Bill Esher and Matthew Cloran have chosen from a bevy of scripts to stage a compelling lineup of gloriously gay plays.

Blair Fell's Naked Will dramatizes Shakespeare's love for his male muse in the sonnets: "Desiring this man's eyes and that man's scope"—sounds like a decent night at the bars. Out on Broadway, co-written as a Forbidden Broadway-style revue by Cloran and Jeff McDonald, turns tunes like "I'm Still Here" into a gay manifesto. There are parodies of numbers from Broadway babies Jerry (Mame) Herman and Stephen (Is he out yet?) Sondheim and there surely will be a few Wicked musical queens flying around.

Maybe you'll bump into Rick Santorum gathering evidence for his anti-gay agenda at the world premiere of Fruitflies, by Katie Stanislavskaya and Jennifer Pilong, about women in the happy orbit of gay men (or is it the other way around?). For one night only there's The Tricky Part, written and performed by Broadway star Martin Moran (pictured, currently in Spamalot), who wrestles with memories of sex, spirituality and even comedy while recounting his true-life sexual relationship as a youth with a 42-year-old counselor at a Catholic boys camp.

Terrence McNally was in Philly last month developing his new play Some Men, and talked lovingly about another of his plays, A Perfect Ganesh, a spiritual passage to India staged here in a rare revival. Some local journeys are depicted in We Are!, stories written and performed by gay youth organization The Rainbow Room of Bucks County. There is also a staged reading of Snow Is Falling, a tender drama about the loss of a lover by Philadelphia Young Playwright Award winner Gabe Bloomfield.

Cloran says this year's festival continues "our bigger mission to get gay and straight audiences to come, and we're doing that pretty well with that. We try to choose works that empower both the GLBT and the general communities." Keep the faith, brother.