By Peter Bowen.

Jacques Martineau’s Côte d’Azur, the opening night film at Outfest 2005.

In recent years, gay and lesbian film festivals like Los Angeles’s Outfest have become victims of their own success. Launched to counter the invisibility of queers in mainstream media, gay festivals have so championed gay representation that it now feels that every self-respecting cable or network television exec wants to include “the gays.” This success, Outfest executive director Stephen Gutwillig explained in his opening night remarks, has prompted some people to ask how much longer gay and lesbian film festivals will be necessary, especially in the increasingly gay-happy town of Hollywood.

The opening night gala showed every sign of a festival riding its success: a packed house ready to see Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s happy-go-lucky French farce Côte d’Azur, in the historic Orpheum theater; a stop-by blessing by the newly elected mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa; a lavish open-air party in downtown L.A. with crowds of homeless people looking on from a distance. But, as Gutwillig pointed out, not all is as it seems: “Despite the new and wonderful queer TV networks, representation of diverse LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] lives in the most mainstream outlets is arguably in decline. The increasingly virulent political climate that wins elections by attacking our very humanity makes mainstream producers, studios and networks — how should we say — understandably shy.”

While the festival struck a now-more-than-ever political tone, the festival’s films on the whole were anything but political. Dealing more with the complexities of desire, the chaos of family life and the catastrophe of growing older, the festival’s selections on the whole reflected a yearning to stay home rather than take to the streets. And for those that did take to the street it was more likely for cruising than marching on city hall.

The documentaries, which are usually the most politically attuned, were for the most part reflective rather than activist. Perhaps the most controversial was Nicole Conn’s little man, which won the Audience Award for OUTstanding. Conn, who gained a name for her gushy lesbian romance Claire of the Moon, took up a camera this time to document her torturous experience trying to save a prematurely born son. While the chronicle of this mother’s trial gained many sympathizers, others (including myself) felt that the roles between filmmaker and subject had become so blurred that the work began to feel like an apologia for Conn’s unrelenting insistence to keep the child alive at all costs. But interestingly, the controversy was all about being a mother, not a lesbian.

Other docs focused on retrieving gay history. Scott Bloom’s Original Pride: The Satyrs Motorcycle Club, Joseph F. Lovett’s erotic nostalgia in Gay Sex in the 70s, Jason Plourde and Sean David West’s Harold’s Home Movies and Walter Stokman’s Based on a True Story all repurposed existing material to flesh out the panorama of gay men in the 20th century — and in many of these films the emphasis was on flesh and the good old bad days before HIV. Much less successful were two docs — Chris Gallagher and Michaline Babich’s Kiki and Herb: Reloaded and John Catania and Charles Ignacio’s The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch — hoping to capture for posterity two diva legends. Unfortunately drag performances, like magic tricks, never seem as interesting onscreen as they do in real life.

Truly the most political subject matter of all at this festival was heterosexuality. Russell Brown’s debut feature, Race You to the Bottom, for example, chronicles a catastrophic weekend in Napa’s wine country between a gay journalist and his secret girlfriend. While this detour into heterosexuality was (thank God!) only a phase, it turned out to be a phase according to the film’s postscreening reception that many gay men have gone through. Rodolphe Marconi’s Le dernier jour, a lyrical French melodrama about a moody young man who develops unseemly emotional intimacy with a strange girl he meets on a train, also highlighted messy romantic relations between the sexes. Even messier is the real-life ménage à trois between two men and a woman chronicled in Susan Kaplan’s documentary Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family. And messiest of all was the cross-sexual multiracial quartet played out in John G. Young’s chamber drama The Reception.

Established gay directors showed up with films that pretty much hid their sexuality away in the bedroom. Brian Sloan’s theatrical post-9/11 WTC View and Canadian Daniel Maclvor’s ensemble piece of small-town gossip Wilby Wonderful are examples of two works that were much more focused on the question of how to live in this brave new world than how to be gay in it.

The one exception was Jon Jones’s charming BBC series When I’m 64, about two very different men — one a rough-hewn granddad, the other a confirmed bachelor — who, at the end of their lives, find in each other a reason to start again. Playing like a gay version of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, the film captures the oppressive expectations the young place on the old.

It was not the political but the commercial that was new this year. The emergence of new gay channels made Outfest a platform to recruit new viewers and tout new shows. The trailers at the head of many screenings advertised not the festival but the coming lineup for here TV. Even the “Boys’ Shorts” program included one hilarious piece, Nick Wauters’s Ryan’s Life (winner of the OUTstanding Narrative Short Film), which we learned at the end is being developed into a series for the channel. Jeremy Simmons’s TransGeneration, a feature version of a documentary series that the Sundance Channel commissioned from the production company World of Wonder, will also appear on the new gay cable network Logo.

Mark Reinhart, executive vice president of acquisitions and distribution at here TV, sees the advent of gay cable channels as a complementary element to Outfest: “I think gay cable channels are going to enhance them. For us, Outfest provides us a way to get word out about our network and films. There are certain gay films, like Kissing Jessica Stein, that are crossover films and will appeal to a larger audience, But there will always be films that will appeal more to a core audience.”

Whether Outfest will also grow into an important market is yet to be seen. Reinhart jokingly laments that his job at here TV has ruined Outfest for him, because now he sees everything by the festival’s start. For new filmmakers, however, like Bottom’s Russell Brown, “Outfest was a great place to show work, since the people I am negotiating with saw it here.”

Regardless of the position of Outfest at this moment in history, the festival has announced its role in preserving lesbian and gay film history with the establishment of the Legacy Project, a collaboration with the UCLA film archives to restore, preserve and archive queer film.