This is understandable, but the question remains as to how beneficial such a stance might be? It's altogether very easy for a large mainstream audience to ignore your Poison's or your Hedwig's when they're being billed as part of some phantom genre, Queer Cinema, and therefore instantly relegated to playing before audiences "into that sort of thing".

It's a question Fabulous! never really answers, the worth of this willful self-atomizing. The success of Brokeback Mountain is surely reason enough for "Queer Cinema" to think about shrugging off the superfluous tag altogether. Ang Lee's flick was never explicitly marketed as "Queer", it was deemed such only by the slack-yapped knuckle-dragging cognoscenti all sniggering at the notion of two "cowboys" (they weren't, incidentally) fumbling with one another's willies, goons who were never going to see it anyway. It was marketed as what it was; A fucking astonishing melodrama. Audiences responded by going to see the damn thing.

What's more important? The artistic growth of the folks making these things, their commercial success, or the fairly wishy-washy notion of community they apparently represent?

(To be all the honest in the world, I don't know that I'd want to be part of any community had Gregg Araki as a resident.)

Mother o' holy Zeus, says I, look at that, all o' thon banter when all I meant for to note was that Fabulous!, whilst incredibly entertaining, is at the same time fairly slight, and never really answers any of the questions you might feasibly find zinging about the head-holes throughout.

Of course, 82 minutes is no amount of time whatever for attempting anything of the like. All Fabulous! can really hope to do, given the constraints of that all-too-meager running time, is offer a break-neck history lesson of a cinematic movement whilst, via a handy time line doohickey, ensuring that any and all cultural and sociological events the filmmakers feel worthy of note are brought to our attention, if only via a momentary name-check.

It certainly does this, and does it with the aid of an array of film-clips and hitherto unseen (by me, any road) footage, most glorious of which is the behind-the-scenes banter between John Waters and Divine either just before or just after shooting the infamous dog shit finale to Pink Flamingos.

But oh what a fella would give for a much lengthier, more focused Extended Edition in which the questions and notions suggested or squinted at from afar throughout the film are settled or at least discussed to any satisfying degree.

To wit:

Just how deep a connection is there 'tween "Queer Cinema" and confrontational, experimental filmmaking?

How prevalent amongst these flicks is the streak of nihilistic abandon found in the work of Gregg Araki, amongst others, and more importantly, just what effect does such fierce, gun-slinging Faggot Rage have on the "straight" sections of the audience?