EVER SINCE THAT glorious late-'90s surge of teen coming-out flicks, set off perhaps by Maria Maggenti's The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, many of us have found ourselves constantly waiting for the next fix. It's the rush of things changing, the tear-jerking pleasure of watching adolescents give their peers and protectors the necessary kiss-off, the performance everyone finally attends and admires. Show Me Love, Beautiful Thing, Get Real, Edge of Seventeen – they're like fairy tales, or old-fashioned romance novels, except the wrap-up isn't so much the moment the characters walk off into the sunset; it's the moment of spillage that causes the horizon to widen, one way or another. Two girls burst out of a high school bathroom together, and suddenly everyone knows. Two boys slow-dance in a courtyard filled with their friends and neighbors. And that's how life will be from now on.

This year's Frameline fest programming seems to send the message that we should grow up and get over it. In the uneven, oddly shaped, sometimes amusing Dorian Blues, by first-time feature director Tennyson Bardwell, coming out is an anticlimax, with a fallout so protracted that it eventually just becomes one boy's life. More successfully, Patrick Grandperret's Clara's Summer offers a muted, uncertain uplift in which a joyously imagined disclosure stands in for reality (maybe). Set during a seemingly interminable week of summer camp somewhere on the coast of France, the film depicts the intensely romantic friendship of two young girls – the gorgeous, moodily soulful title character (Selma Brook) and her best friend, Zoë (Stéphanie Sokolinski) – and how it's affected by encounters with the pack mentality. Driven by the energy of hormonally charged teenagers let loose on holiday – it's kind of like Meatballs for people unnerved by the sight of guys surreptitiously filming their female campmates in the shower – Clara's Summer examines deliberate viciousness as a coping mechanism and the ways in which early friendships are intricately involved in the process of coming out.

Then there's Sugar, a film by John Palmer based on Bruce La Bruce's short story collection JD. In Palmer and cowriter Todd Klink's brave, if fucked-up, new world, a mother understands and sympathizes with her son's need to hang out with a handsome, crack-addicted street hustler (Brendan Fehr, in a pretty amazing performance that almost makes up for the cancellation of Roswell), and a 12-year-old girl is so wise beyond her years that she practically single-handedly – though not first-handedly – initiates her brother (Andre Noble) into a life of getting laid. Charming and odd, more a story about coming of age (and coming) than coming out, Sugar is full of comic shocks to the system, and even as it swerves into the territory of tragedy, it does so with a caustic, deliberate refusal to submerge itself there.

Lynn Rapoport