By Dennis Harvey

THE 27TH SAN Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival kicks off with something very old-school: a suffering retro-diva performance so exquisitely poised, mannered, and actually-well-no-maybe-just-possibly felt that it will make your heels involuntarily rise to new platforms of admiration. In Die Mommie Die!, adapted from the stage play, author-star Charles Busch plays Angela Arden, a onetime Hit Parade song thrush long since retired to the no less up-and-down charts of late 1960s Beverly Hills domesticity. Her marriage to socially conscious but privately loutish film producer Sol Sussman (Philip Baker Hall) having long since soured, Angela channels bank-flooding eddies of theatrical emotion toward her children, her drop-dead wardrobe, her immaculate rose garden, and on occasion her even bushier (if discreet, well kinda) libido – the latest fertilizer being no less than erstwhile Beverly Hills 90210 hottie Jason Priestley as notorious tennis instructor-failed actor-general-purpose gigolo Tony Parker.

But oh! Wouldn't you just know it, despite the trappings of wealth, pleasure, and poise, Angela is so, so desperately unhappy. Sol treats her like a high-priced whore he's permanently bought but now expends only the milky white insult of ridicule upon. Daughter Edith (Natasha Lyonne) is a total daddy's girl blind to all of Father's faults, while poisonously alert to Momma's every last one. Son Lance (Stark Sands) is by contrast devoted. But this hereditarily incongruous blond über-twink has just been expelled from college, for being a shameless "sexual magnet" for the male faculty. The boy can't help it – surely distant fathering and smothering motherhood made him that way. (In one of the movie's great moments, Angela sits him down for an earnest heart-to-heart, asking the dreaded question in a jaded showbiz veteran's kind-yet-crass terms: "Honey, are you a cocksucker?")

The untimely, if generally atmosphere-improving, death of Sol raises suspicions of murder that provide Die Mommie Die! with its major, albeit ersatz, narrative propulsion. Rest assured the "mystery" 's resolution allows for both noble suffering and teary reconciliation that affirm family values in the most bogus terms possible. En route, Busch, director Mark Rucker, and the entire cast make every situation a symphony in purple sentimentality, yellow journalism, and shocking pink camp.

Tongue inserted far into its cheek, Die! is in some ways just as meticulous an homage to a prior era's Hollywood style as Far from Heaven, with a central performance just as immaculately, intellectually realized. (If audiences and the Academy semi-bought into Julianne Moore's extraordinary exhibition of technique, however, rest assured the embrace extended toward Busch will be at arm's length.) Admittedly, it's nowhere near as exquisite a reproduction of period filmic style, whether by choice or by budgetary or imaginative limitation.

But then the genre source here was aesthetically uglier, not to mention less critically defensible in comparison to Heaven's Douglas Sirk melodramas. This is the world of major studios grasping at straws, those 1960s Ross Hunter vehicles for atrophying she-idols (especially Susan Hayward) whose histrionics looked increasingly antique as that turbulent decade progressed. Yet fans were reluctant to let go of a once winning formula, and producers even less so. Hence the late-decade appearance of comically ghastly off-lot exploitations straddling old and new clichés, like The Big Cube (Lana Turner as an elegant widow dosed on LSD by ruthless beatniks) or The Naked Zoo (Rita Hayworth as a hard-drinking matron dosed on LSD by ruthless hippies). These, in addition to the lurid pre-"now" generation likes of Where Love Has Gone and Peyton Place, are the far-from-sacred texts Die Mommie Die! springs from.

That, brother, is camp. And if camp is what much of gay cinema – even gay culture – was built on, there's a case to be made for camp as the original spoken tongue of a no-longer-so-secret sexuality. Which is not to say plenty of homosexual acts (and love) didn't go on B.C., before camp, with no glitter or bitching required. But as code recognizing the existence of a community, however subterranean, it was there long before that whole handkerchief thing came and went. (Wait. Is the handkerchief code camp now?)

Camp is (or at least once was) an insiderdom that willfully excludes the excluders, stinging them back in ways they're presumably too stupid to grok. Its grand-père was of course Oscar Wilde, the first great distiller of language that (as Philip Coyne succinctly put it) "lies to tell the truth." Wilde's insistence on viewing (and valuing) everything in degrees of artifice turned the inherently theatrical nature of a closeted life into a literal all-the-world's-a-stage metaphor, philosophy, and fashion. It's a reverse elitism that understands how – with a little wishful thinking on the part of the viewer – the excesses, foibles, and clichés of "normal" society can be seen to parody themselves.

Thus camp, as well as campy behavior, is at once yearning and revenge, adoration and ridicule, co-optation and rejection (of an image or idea's seriousness). In cinema, ultimate camp sprang first from the images most exaggeratedly, absurdly heterosexual in appeal – Maria Montez as "exotic" sexpot Cobra Woman, Victor Mature grimacing earnestly atop manly muscle-mountains, Busby Berkeley's geometrical girl-sculptures – or from divas whose femininity grew so assertively stylized it suggested unintentional gender blur (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck).

These near-lunatic extremes inspire subversive interpretation, not to mention imitation. As Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty noted in their introduction to 1995's academic compendium Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, "camp has the ability to 'queer' straight culture by asserting that there is queerness at the core of mainstream culture even though that culture tirelessly insists that its images, ideologies, and readings were always only about heterosexuality." From this vantage point, drag queening (as performance mode, separate from more deeply individual issues of transgender identity) doesn't mock womanhood itself so much as femininity as a social construct of self-objectifying style. Or better still, it's a subversive act against the fear of gender-role malleability, root of the machismo that breeds homophobia itself.

Intentional camp arrived with the gay sensibilities that were key to the rise of an American underground cinema – Kenneth Anger, the Kuchars, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol. This in turn led to its institutional recognition as an aesthetic, famously heralded in Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp." Defying her own knowledge that "to talk about camp is to betray it," Sontag's very serious attempt to categorize and define camp in intellectual, even quasi-anthropological terms now reads very hit-and-miss, but it helped make camp another must-do "experience" for her generation. Straight stoner audiences grew hysterical at midnight displays of Carmen Miranda and Reefer Madness. The brief, magic moment when hippie and gay radicalism twined reached its zenith in S.F.'s own Cockettes – the ultimate expression of camp as subversion, nostalgia, gender-fuck, theater, and lifestyle.

Thus began the theoretically perverse co-optation of camp by straights, even as an actual out/proud queer cinema struggled to walk and talk. This may strike you as a good, very bad, or merely indifferent thing. Nonetheless, there's definitely something just a wee bit soul-killing about such arch mainstream developments as the recent, deservedly bombing hetero date flick Down with Love and Will and Grace, which each week has millions glued to gay men and straight women camping right into the wind, that style proof of their consummate urban superficiality. (What are they rebelling against? Nothing. When camp as style is defanged enough to float a successful sitcom, mixed emotions are surely called for.)

As Danae Clark asked in her 1991 article "Commodity Lesbianism," "Once 'camp' is commodified by the culture industry, how do we continue to camp it up?" This year's festival program provides the usual range of answers, not all of them happy. Deliberate camp is always a risk – it's easy to be cheesy, hard to be smart. This year's Frameline Award winners Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato make a fascinating focus point because they're notably camp documentary filmmakers. They've often chosen subjects (Tammy Faye Baker, Monica Lewinsky, L.A. rent boys, and now Anna Nicole Smith) that are easily derided, and in the editing room their sympathetic shoulder-to-cry-on approach shades toward pop-ironic tabloid ridicule. Their problematic first narrative feature, the fact-based Party Monster (with grown-up Macaulay Culkin as NYC "club kid" murderer Michael Alig), underlines the difficulty in dimensionalizing characters when you're blindsided by their immediate, self-incriminating eccentricities. A general rule for intentional camp: Irony good, smirkiness bad.

Elsewhere in the sprawling (three weeks, seemingly the new norm) festival, camp expression ranges from the searching to the "search me." On the retrospective front, Marc Huestis's 1982 featurette Whatever Happened to Susan Jane? remains a springy, semifictive last hurrah for S.F.'s unfettered joy in polysexual silliness, pre-AIDS. Among new works, Yes Nurse! No Nurse! is an agitatedly antic film adaptation of a long-running Dutch stage musical that eventually wins you over with the sweetness of its all-sexual-persuasion-embracing romantic and musical parodies. In the "Bhangra by the Bay" program, 40-minute video "The Pink Mirror" turns a "mother/daughter" drag queen duel of competitive beauty and stud-pursuit into both Bollywood camp and earnest family melodrama.

The perils of assuming that mere campiness will provide a wisdom and purpose otherwise absent are apparent in local filmmaker Jennifer M. Kroot's Sirens of the 23rd Century, a jokey future fantasia whose Day-Glo colors shine more brightly than the vague, hectic love-hate toward glam femininity that comprises its cloudy content. The shorts bill "Spoofed!" likewise too often assumes dress-up mimicry constitutes subversion in itself, particularly in J.D. Disalvatore's "Gay Propaganda," which has the genius-not idea of restaging scenes from famous hetero movies (From Here to Eternity, The Graduate, Reservoir Dogs, et al.) with same-sex or gender-reversed actors! This sort of high-labor, low-yield exercise reminds us that the one thing film school can't teach you is how to have an original idea. Elsewhere on that program, however, one brief episode from J. Sedelmaier's brilliant "Saturday TV Funhouse" animation irregular "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" renews one's faith in camp as subversion, while Kurt Koehler's 25-minute "Superfag" genially imagines Superman in an entirely gay L.A. context. Its archvillain is a questionably heterosexual sexophobe who propagandistically "poisons" gay porn tapes, telling one new victim, "There's some good deprogramming on tonight!"

Die Mommie Die! aside, my fave genuflection toward the altar of camp in the entire festival isn't even particularly 'mo. Or at least it doesn't care enough to define itself as being one way or the other, reflecting one more reason why I am proud to be Canadian (on both parents' sides). In Lee Demarbre's Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, Our Savior (cute Phil Caracas) rises from the dead yet again to combat bloodsuckers who are "harvesting lesbians" to assault humanity. This epic effort from Ottawa's punk community salutes 1970s schlock cinema via rampant kung-faux (an entire coffee table is sacrificed in the cause of one fight scene alone), bad dialogue postsynching, cheap gore FX, key guest appearances by Mexican wrestling superhero Santo, and J.C.'s own righteous sideburns.

He might be disappointed when his sexy mortal sidekick ultimately goes for a redeemed undead goth chick (even the Son o' Gawd has those equatorial stirrings, it seems), but he preaches, "There's nothing deviant about love." This Jesus is so for real that he can be ass-whupped on occasion; the gratuitous scat singing interlude he attempts to join is further proof of very human frailty. Still, he is wise as well as righteous and loving: His blessings pointedly encompass the whole sex-pref spectrum. This exercise in Troma-style ('cept it's actually funny) multigenre send-up is soooo camp, like a fox.

San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival