In a year like this one, it's good to be gay. Hey, it's more than good; it's downright hip to be homosexual. It's still OK to be straight, of course, but it's so much better to at least have the decency to be a straight person with gay friends, doing "gay things," and happily interacting in a world of diverse, wide-open, polymorphous sexualities.Yep, it's good to be gay. No, make that queer. As with so many other former slurs, this one has been gleefully appropriated and reclaimed by the very parties it was intended to injure.

The current wave of queer-o-mania didn't start with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but that's certainly where much of the attention has come to roost. In case you've been living under a rock all summer, Queer Eye debuted on the Bravo cable network on July 15 of this year and quickly became the hottest television show of the season.

Here's the premise of this immensely appealing and ridiculously popular series: A quintet of nearly magically gifted fairy godmothers -- experts in fashion, grooming, interior design, cuisine and culture -- storms into the pathetic life of some hapless heterosexual and turns the poor slob's world around for the better. Every week, the self-dubbed Fab Five (a moniker actually lifted from early '80s rapper Fred "Fab Five" Braithwaite) are witty, amusing, occasionally over-the-top, but always endearing and compassionate. And every week, our unambiguously gay superheroes win new fans as they (along with the aid of some major product placement) help yet another clueless breeder realize his full potential as a happy, immaculately groomed consumer.

Queer Eye is Bravo's highest-rated show ever. And when NBC aired a condensed, prime time version of the show a week after its Bravo premiere, the show sucked in almost 7-million more fans. The rest, as they say, is history.

Factor in the Supreme Court's recent ruling that Texas anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional and the Episcopal Church's approval of its first openly gay bishop, and it's suddenly looking more and more like a gay, gay, gay, gay world. Besides Queer Eye and its immediate forerunner, the eternally cute and cuddly Will and Grace, the airwaves are taking a distinctly queer turn, from Showtime's steamy Queer as Folk to Bravo's somewhat dicey same-sex dating show, Boy Meets Boy. At least three new shows with gay or lesbian characters are slated for the fall season, including several featuring gay couples in long-term relationships matter-of-factly described as marriages. And if you still need convincing that something's going on, a groundbreaking new pay-per-view service called here! debuted last month, offering a wide range of exclusively gay-themed programming on demand.

Of course, all of this might have just the tiniest bit to do with the fact that gay men and lesbians are estimated to account for 8 to 12 percent of the U.S. population, with an annual spending power of some $450-billion. That makes the gay population the most substantial yet underserved television audience in the country.

"Advertisers realize there's money there," says Jennifer Morris, co-director of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, one of the most important events of its kind in the world. "They're now taking the gay population seriously. For its money," she adds with a laugh.

The irony of all this success is that gay and lesbian film festivals -- the natural locus and showcase of gay community and culture -- are beginning to look like victims of too much of a good thing.

As queer stories have become an increasingly marketable commodity, many distributors of gay films have grown more and more reluctant to allow their products to play gay film festivals. Distributors justify this curious decision by explaining that it's not fair to pigeonhole their movies as "strictly for gays." What they're really saying is that, with every gay movie now a potential crossover hit, a one-night stand at a festival might hurt the movie's chances for an eventual wider release.

The problem is compounded by a few other things. First, many of our most acclaimed gay and lesbian filmmakers, seduced by the dangling carrot of mainstream success and increasingly frustrated at being stuck in what is sometimes referred to as the festival ghetto, have begun making films with more universal appeal. Translation: less gay content.

And second, in a climate where television often seems to be the tail wagging the dog of pop culture, cable and network TV are commissioning much of the best gay-themed programming, film and otherwise, and buying up the rest.

One of the festivals struggling with this phenomenon is the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which opens its 14th season this week at Tampa Theatre. Margaret Murray, who served as the festival's film programmer in 2001 and 2002, is all-too aware of the ever-growing difficulty of securing quality gay films.

"It's a problem. One thing that's really hurt programming for film festivals is cable, specifically HBO," explains Murray. "For the past few years, they've been quietly snapping up all these really amazing films, like Southern Comfort and Cheryl Dunye's Stranger Inside, which means these films are not available for festival screenings. Usually what happens is they'll pick a film up at the Toronto Film Festival [in late summer, early fall], so that by the time the later festivals roll around, they've acquired the rights to it. That means you can't show it."

As Queers Go By

Gay and lesbian images have been part of the movies since the medium's earliest days. Films such as Alla Nazimova's 1923 Salome and J.S. Watson and Melville Webber's 1933 Lot in Sodom paved the way for seminal artists like Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau, who infused their delirious visions with a poetic and sometimes subversive gay sensibility. Gay content in the Hollywood of the '40s and '50s is mostly confined to a netherworld of subtext, but hunt and peck through films like Hitchcock's Rope, Nick Ray's Johnny Guitar or virtually anything by George Cukor and it's impossible to ignore something queer's afoot.

Things heated up in the '60s with openly gay filmmakers like Pier Paolo Pasolini churning out uncompromising odes to sex, God and politics over in Europe, while underground iconoclasts like Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol mixed it up over on this side of the pond. The '70s and '80s radicalized and refined things further, with explorations of gay identity running through many of the masterpieces of the German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder and the early comedies of Spain's Pedro Almodovar.

Even Hollywood got into the act, sort of, with the occasional movie that dipped a toe or three into queer waters, from Dog Day Afternoon and Midnight Cowboy to Boys in the Band and the ill-conceived Making Love. And let's not forget Philadelphia, of course, the mother of all mainstream gay movies. Meanwhile, though, the first signs of the emergence of an authentic, full-blown queer cinema were appearing in the works of England's Derek Jarman, while young American filmmakers like Gus Van Sant followed suit with strong stuff like 1985's Mala Noche.

The apex of all this was the New Queer Cinema, a very loosely connected group of gay filmmakers who, in the early '90s, produced a small but stunning body of work that took the film world by storm. These movies were all very different from each other, but each, in its way, fearlessly addressed gay subjects or notions of homosexual identity, without attempting to make speeches, prettify the picture or comfort mainstream sensibilities. Most of these films were also politically incorrect in the extreme, something that seemed pretty refreshing at that time.

The New Queer Cinema was ushered in with Todd Haynes' brilliant Poison, which won the 1991 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, back when an award from that festival still meant something. The following year saw the back-to-back releases of Tom Kalin's Swoon (an openly gay re-telling of Hitch's Rope and based on the same source material) and Christopher Munch's The Hours and the Times (a delicate reverie on Brian Epstein's barely suppressed love for John Lennon). Gregg Araki's brutally powerful The Living End showed up barely a year later, and suddenly the New Queer Cinema was about all people could talk about.

So where are these filmmakers now? Kalin and Munch have all but dropped out of sight, while others, like Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Pierce, are now seriously toying with the prospect of making mainstream movies. Gregg Arraki's latest films (The Doom Generation and nowhere) have been more concerned with comic book visions of teen angst than with sexual orientation. Todd Haynes, probably the most talented of the bunch, has all but completely crossed over, having expanded his horizons to include witty, gender-oblivious explorations of New Age mysticism (Safe) and glam rock (Velvet Goldmine). Haynes' most recent project -- the multi-Oscar nominated Far from Heaven -- re-invents '50s melodrama.

With more and more queer filmmakers moving up through the ranks and turning their backs on the festival circuit, it's simply not that easy for a festival to secure the sort of groundbreaking, buzz-producing films that can make an event's reputation. Even more problematically, there's some question as to whether festival audiences accustomed to the easily digestible laughs of Will and Grace are even in any sort of mood for that edgier, groundbreaking fare.

Margaret Murray spent two years sneaking exactly these sorts of films into the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Following closely in the footsteps of TIGLFF's legendary curator Dorothy Abbott, Murray's goal was to balance a lineup of upbeat crowd-pleasers with a smattering of the sort of smart, challenging or otherwise "difficult" films that, brilliant though they may be, often leave audiences scratching their heads. "That was something I always battled," she remembers. "I think gay and lesbian audiences are really just like heterosexual audiences in that they want a movie that has cute people in it that make them laugh."

Longtime TIGLFF supporter Victoria Jorgensen, now the festival's board president, is also a huge fan of those increasingly rare, non-mainstream-friendly gay films, but she tends to agree that those aren't necessarily the movies that festival goers want to see. In some ways, the problem facing festivals isn't even so much the mainstreaming of gay cinema as it is the mainstreaming of gay audiences.

"What we're dealing with here, audience-wise," adds Jorgensen, "is not necessarily people who view film for art. They want to come in, be happy, see a little skin. They want to be around each other and have the experience of being in a large place with lots of people and the smell of popcorn."

The recent strategy of many gay and lesbian film festivals across the country has been to expand their audience's horizons gently, by presenting films from around the world, films that show the diversity of gay life in places like Russia or the Philippines. The first lesbian film from China, for instance, is currently making the rounds on the festival circuit. But for every potentially too-exotic or controversial queer portrait, there are often three or four innocuously charming and utterly forgettable films that portray gay characters as stereotypes or simplistically positive role models. Though these films usually have their good points, same-sex versions of mainstream comedic and dramatic formulas have pretty much come to dominate many gay and lesbian festivals.

More than a few voices are saying that might be the road Tampa's festival is beginning to head down.

"There's a danger of losing the cutting edge, yes," says Keven Renken, who just this year stepped into Margaret Murray's shoes as the programming director of TIGLFF. "Ten years ago, gay films were all about guerilla filmmaking, very independent and very low budget. They've become a lot more mainstream, and more of them are actually being released into the mainstream market.

"Some of the films we're looking at in this year's festival are going to be much more high profile," adds Renken. "People like Diane Wiest, Olympia Dukakis and Gina Gershon are now in gay-themed films. Like it or not, people come to films at film festivals if they recognize names. Names sell. If mainstream actors and actresses are making these sorts of films and we can get them in the film festival, that speaks to an audience."

The good news is that riskier and more ambitious gay and lesbian movies are still being made. The bad news is that, even though they're out there, not too many of them seem to be turning up in film festivals like Tampa's. Two of the best gay films I saw this year, Madame Sata and The Embalmer, showed up at a 10-film mini-festival held recently in Sarasota. Over three times that many feature films are being presented at this year's Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, but, of the dozen or so features I've previewed so far, almost none approach that level of originality or artistic accomplishment.

Is the Tampa festival simply playing it a little too safe this year? Margaret Murray is among those who seem to think so. "I have been keeping up with [new gay and lesbian film releases], and there's some amazing stuff out there," says Murray, lamenting the fact that those films didn't find a home at the Bay area's premiere showcase for queer cinema. "The Tampa film festival's definitely taken a track more towards the mainstream, and they've admitted that."

Queer Factor

The TIGLFF, one of the largest gay film festivals in the country, has a proud history of bringing amazing and thought-provoking movies into an area that doesn't get nearly enough of them. A brief survey of some of the festival's past highlights would have to include crowd-pleasing crossover hits such as Jeffrey, the heartwarming The Sum of Us (featuring an early performance by Russell Crowe) and the stylish lesbian thriller-diller Bound. But many of the films that made the strongest impressions -- and crystallized the festival's rep as a major national event -- worked so well precisely because of the chances they took.

Those highlights include such challenging fare as Beautiful Thing (a gritty but ultimately joyous slice-of-life that puts a brave new spin on coming of age and coming out), the sensual, sinister Madagascar Skin and the relentlessly dark Butterfly Kiss. Then there was Michael Cuesta's remarkable L.I.E., which veers between loopy humor and horror story, eventually crystallizing as an extremely controversial tale of redemption for a sexual predator. And will anyone ever forget sitting in the audience at Tampa Theatre last year and basking in the sounds of a live orchestra as the glorious images of Claire filled our eyes?

TIGLFF, like other gay film festivals, has always manifested a bit of a split personality. It's caught between the desire to promote cinema as an art form and the need to represent and serve a specific community, whose members -- as is true with communities everywhere -- often just want to experience something they can feel good about. In many ways this year's Tampa festival might not be all that different from those of other years. The whole mainstreaming brouhaha swirling around the festival, however, makes it feel that way.

For better or worse, queer cinema has a lot to live up to. Cocteau, Genet and the other giants of the last century set the bar high, deliberately turning their very gayness into a kind of dangerous poetry that filled their work. For them, being queer -- different, an outsider -- was an intimate and crucial part of their art, something beautiful yet mysterious, an unsanctioned, unseen and forbidden act of rebellion. This outsider aesthetic still informs many of the best queer movies and stands at direct odds with the urge to assimilate, to be accepted into the mainstream. Any way you look at it, queer cinema stands a world apart from the cozy confines of Will and Grace and the Fab Five.

"You have those who want gay people to just sort of melt into the woodwork," says David Wright, a professor of art history at USF, "which is exactly what a lot of us do every day. But as far as I'm concerned, people are all different in different ways. I'm not particularly taken with the idea that you have to present a certain image of gay people, whether you present them as respectable and just like everybody else. Gay people are not like everybody else."

One way that gay film festivals may be able to demonstrate that gay people are and aren't like everybody else is by showing movies that simply make them more real. That means not only real feelings, ideas and personalities, but also real sex lives -- something even the most adventurous and high-profile television shows have denied them.

Despite some energetic, hands-on frolicking on Showtime's Queer as Folk, and a few famous same-sex kisses on episodes of Roseanne and WB's Dawson's Creek, TV's treatment of gays and lesbians has been weirdly sexless. From Ellen and Will and Grace to NYPD Blue, ER and Six Feet Under, not to mention way too much MTV programming, gay characters have been prominently featured; however, they are almost never seen acting on their sexuality. There's no dating, no hand holding, and certainly no acknowledgment of anything going on below the waist.

It's almost as if today's gay television characters are stuck in some strange time warp that transported them back to the 1950s (or TV's version of the '50s), where they became sterile, same-sex Ozzie and Harriets, only hipper and with better taste. The all-seeing Queer Eye phenomenon may have been able to transform gay frogs into princes, but it certainly wasn't a kiss that did the trick.

Keven Renken doesn't have much good to say about the way television effectively neuters its gay characters, and thinks that void suggests how gay film festivals can reassert their authority and set themselves apart from the pack. "Characters like the ones on Will and Grace are basically clowns," he remarks. "I think it's such a pity that in order to be mainstream, so much of that eroticism happens to go by the wayside."

Much of what you'll find in almost any gay and lesbian film festival is bound to be more erotic than Will and Grace, but Renken maintains it's often an inauthentic, watered-down eroticism, aimed at the wrong people and for all the wrong reasons. He rolls his eyes remembering festivals past and one too many films featuring gay men who, tortured about their sexuality, wind up sleeping with women. Renken chuckles, joking that it sometimes seems moviegoers stand a better chance of seeing straight sex than gay sex at a gay film festival.

"One of my goals for this year was to try to find films that really expressed gay sexuality," says Renken, "and I think we got a few films that do that." He mentions a handful, like Bulgarian Lovers and Gone But Not Forgotten, as well as his favorite, Leaving Metropolis. This last one, interestingly enough, was scripted by Brad Fraser, one of the writers for the popular television series Queer as Folk.

From Queer to Eternity

It's still a very, very good time to be gay, but one wonders for just how long. Acclaim for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has been nearly universal, but in a pop culture where 15 minutes of fame is a long time, just how much longer can the honeymoon last? There are already whiffs of trouble in paradise, beginning with the Washington Post's influential critic Tom Shales, who rails against the Fab Five and the show for their "patronizing" attitude. Others, including several key spokespersons in the gay community, claim the show feeds old stereotypes of gays as fussy, shallow savants of style (not to mention the stereotypes of straight males as insensitive slobs).

Could this be the beginning of the backlash? Don't forget that even at the height of Queer Eye's popularity, President Bush made a point of joining hands with the Vatican to formally declare opposition to gay marriage. Dubya even put a small army of lawyers to work drafting documents specifically defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. It's a topic sure to be hotter than hot in the next presidential campaign, and it's unclear which way the debate will swing.

It's hard not to think of early Christians and lions here. Adversity makes us stronger, so they say, or at least more interesting. In that sense, if the straight world wakes up tomorrow and suddenly decides that maybe gay isn't so groovy after all, there may be worse fates -- at least for gay cinema, which to some extent has always thrived under oppression and in the shadows. What happens to the people who make that cinema and watch it is another story.

In any event, the current boom in All Things Queer will certainly result in an immediate and unprecedented demand for new gay-themed movies. But what form will those movies take? And how and where will they be seen?

"We've always provided films and themes and images for things you're not going to see on TV," notes the San Francisco festival's Jennifer Morris, "even on cable. That's the thing about our film festival -- you can usually come and get to see a greater diversity of stories. On top of that, you're coming together in a movie theater with another thousand people watching the film and laughing and responding the same way, as opposed to sitting in your living room by yourself. It's a very important way to celebrate your community with like-minded people."

For some parts of the country, gay and lesbian film festivals fulfill other important functions as well. In San Francisco, with its huge, energetic gay community and its thriving network of non-mainstream movie venues, a gay and lesbian festival is just the icing on the cake. In our other Bay area -- a world away in Tampa, Fla., -- a gay and lesbian film festival can seem like a lifeline.

"I think the biggest reason our festival exists," says TIGLFF's Renken, "is because of the market we live in. If it wasn't for this festival, these films would probably never play in a movie theater in Tampa. Ever."

With each passing year, The Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has become increasingly visible and increasingly popular. But this year's a bit different. As with so many other gay and lesbian film festivals around the country, all eyes seem to be on TIGLFF this year, so the stakes are inevitably higher. There can be little doubt that this is a year of transition, not just for the festival but for the movies themselves, which is what it all finally comes down to.

"With a festival like this," says Renken, "you can go out in public and show people that this is the kind of film you like, and it becomes almost like a political act. I think it's really important that we give people the opportunity to take that political stance."

As the programming director warms to his subject, he begins talking faster, and smiling. "All I know is that for 11 days I'm going to go see these films, lots of films, and I'm going to go see them with a whole bunch of other people who like these films." And then, as if suddenly realizing that movie-going as a political act is a concept deserving of both amplification and a wink, he lets loose with a big, fat "So there!" and smiles again.

Weekly Planet editor Jim Harper, who commissioned and edited this article, is a former board president of the TIGLFF. He's no longer involved in its leadership, but as a donor, ticket-buyer and enthusiastic attendee, he continues to support the film festival.