CommercialAppeal.com – John Beifuss
Annual gay-lesbian film event Outflix Festival opens Saturday
“Small Town Gay Bar,” which was executive-produced by Kevin Smith (“Clerks II”) and which screens Saturday night as the opening feature in this year’s Outflix Festival, offers a fascinating tour and cultural history of a phenomenon that may be unknown to most Mid-Southerners: the presence of lively if often short-lived gay dance clubs, roadhouses and watering holes on the back roads and off-highways of North Mississippi.
“The nights we would get raided, there’d be drag queens in full dress running across the field in high heels, trying to clear a couple of barb-wire fences,” says the patron of one defunct club. “So you got to hand it to ’em, if they didn’t know how to dance, they knew how to run.”
“Small Town Gay Bar,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, screens at 7:15 p.m. Saturday at Muvico’s Peabody Place 22. Malcolm Ingram, the movie’s Toronto-based director, will introduce the film and answer questions afterward. Several of the documentary’s featured subjects — including Lake County drag queen “Alicia Stone” — also will be present.
The presence of Ingram and his movie — a View Askew Production, just like such other, more commercial Kevin Smith projects as “Chasing Amy” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” — is one reason Mark Jones of the Outflix Festival selection committee describes this year’s gay and lesbian-oriented film event as representing a “quantum leap” over past programs.
For the first time, the festival is taking place mostly in a commercial movie theater, thanks to a budget that has grown from $1,500 to $14,000 in private and corporate donations. The event has expanded from four to six nights, and its record roster of 22 films includes shorts, documentaries and features with name stars, such as the romantic comedy “What’s Up, Scarlet?” with Sally Kirkland.