Like most 5-year-olds, Q Cinema is now steady on its feet. This year's festival has several local and national premieres of documentaries and fictional pieces, plus films with plenty of local connections. There's Neverland, an updating of the Peter Pan story set in a decaying amusement park where Tinkerbell isn't the only fairy and the original story's kids in war paint are now grown-ups in a Native American-style drag show. Then, A Bear's Story focuses on a heavy-set, hairy-chested gay man who feels like a pariah in gay clubs until he finds a meeting of "bears," a group of men who look like him. Opening night features Danny in the Sky, a French film with English subtitles about an aspiring gay model who ends up working in strip bars and on porn films.
But the gamut is even more broad. The subject matters represented include how ethnicity affects the coming-out process, whether monogamy is possible, how non-mainstream religions view homosexuality, the mythological "gaydar," lesbian bodybuilders and raising a child with two daddies. There are murder mysteries, parodies of famous "straight" films and even Kelly Clarkson (the former American Idol appears in Issues 101). There's plenty to learn--besides some new slang.