"Finally, I was seeing my story up there."

Whatever the head doing the yakking, be it Gus Van Sant or Todd Haynes or Jane Lynch or Heather Matarazzo or any of the other folks appearing herein, they all appear to have at least one story involving one flick seemed to be addressing them personally, and if they don't mention it in the feature itself chances are they do in the (fairly brief) extra interviews collected on the DVD.

This quest for identification, for acknowledgement, it seems to drive both the film-makers and the audiences, a quest that maybe explains why such disparate, eclectic films as, say, Todd Haynes Poison and Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman are mentioned in the same breath when, in any other context, they'd be perched next to other with all the awkwardness and peculiarity of a nutsack 'side a daisy.

Aye, for what becomes most apparent throughout Fabulous! is that Queer Cinema is a pseudo-genre with many faces, right enough. The two most recognizable faces, they bear little relation to one another whatever, and a curious tension seems to exist between them.

Over yonder, all soft-focus and squinting in the sunlight, a fella might find the romantic, melodramatic face, a face with the jaws all Brokeback Mountain and the eyebrows all Making Love and the bridge of the nose all Treading Water.

And there, stood by the gas station with the jeans hung low and the bare chest all scarred and sweating, there we see the other face, the snarling, split-lipped face of the challenging, experimental, confrontational variant. This face, with the gums all Nowhere and the tongue all Poison and the retinas all Tarnation, it bears no relation to that other character, and yet these two fizzogs are seemingly embraced as one by an audience thirsting for a particular tale, and open to any and all interpretations of such.

It's illustrative of an audience open-mindedness that goes well beyond the loins, for sure, but illustrative of something else, also:

That Queer Cinema - a ghettoizing term which, much like World Music, was probably necessary once upon time - is now much of a nonsense. What do the films of Gregg Araki have in common with, say, D.E.B.S? Surely it does neither any good to be lumped with the other in such a shallow, superficial fashion, for no reason other than both feature folks who're fond of a same-sex sexing of occasion?

But again, y'understand, we come to this notion of identity, of representation and of any amount of terms flung like bags o' pennies round about the classrooms of any Media Studies course, splinking this way and that from off of any and all examples of the cinematic craft. It becomes apparent that, coupled with this need to see oneself reflected up yonder (although pray holy Jesus it'll be via an image of Heath Ledger or Susan Sarandon and not, y'know, us) is the need to feel part of something. Something diverse and exciting and challenging and powerful.