Rushes

The past couple of months have already seen an ongoing, gay-themed series of midnight movies cosponsored by the Inwood Theater and The Met, and a Silver Anniversary USA Film Festival schedule rich in gay and lesbian-themed features. Which means that the organizers of the 1995 Gay & Lesbian Festival, which gets rolling at the Inwood and the Dallas Theater Center April 27-29, have their work cut out for them. One hopes that local cinephiles won't be movied-out by that point, because this year's lineup sports a number of intriguing and provocative titles.

The festival opens at the Inwood April 27 at 7 p.m. with The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, a debut feature from dir-ector Maria Maggenti about an interracial romance between two high schoolers--a white tomboy and a popular and academically gifted African-American girl. At 9:30 p.m. in the same location is Lie Down with Dogs, writer-director Wally White's coming of age story about a young man named Tommie (played by White) who spends a sunny summer in the gay beach resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Both screenings will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers, who have been flown in by the festival programmers to attend the event.

On April 28 at 6 p.m. at the Dallas Theater Center's Kalita Humphreys auditorium, Ray Murray, author of Images in the Dark: An Encyc-lopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video, will lecture and sign books. Appropriately, his appearance will be followed at 7 p.m. by a jury-selected program of gay- and lesbian-themed short films from across the United States.

Scheduled for 11:30 p.m. is a program that will no doubt rank as one of the more popular on the schedule: Male Erotic Shorts. The program includes a hilariously scatological humor piece called "Dick Tricks" (which is about exactly what you think), and a surreal, free-form, compelling nonfiction work from Germany titled "He is Bold and He is Racist, He is Gay and He is a Fascist," an examination of the popularity of the skinhead look, which many gay men admit to finding sexy despite (or perhaps because of) its links to bigotry and oppression.

Tickets are $5 per program; all-festival passes are available for $35 at Tapelenders, 3926 Cedar Springs; Crossroads bookstore, 3930 Cedar Springs; and at the Inwood Theater, 5458 West Lovers Lane, on opening night. For a complete schedule and accompanying ticket information, turn to Film Capsules or call the festival offices at 257-4443.

--Matt Zoller Seitz (reeling@aol.com)