It's been 31 years since a bunch of gay film freaks in San Francisco put together a showing of queer-themed movies, thereby founding the world's oldest, largest, and–by many accounts–most important festival of LGBT cinema. This year's Frameline International Film Festival, an 11-day blow-out held chiefly at San Francisco's historic (and gorgeous) Castro Theater, featured an eyeball-straining 232 films, including 77 features.

Part of the pleasure of any film festival is the discovery of unexpected delights, part of the peril being stuck staring at the unwatchable. But gay film festivals do more; they reflect the current state of queer life.

Since the 1970s, that life has, at least in the Western World, come a long way. And in the era of Transamerica, and Brokeback Mountain, queer-themed films have completed their journey from oppositional underground status to mainstream acceptance and commercial clout. Which is to say: these days, just what's a gay film festival for?

Well, for one thing, it gives folks a chance to view movies that might not receive commercial distribution, that might not be available except on DVD, or might not otherwise be seen at all. And, as one Castro-goer says, "There's something great about seeing a gay movie in a theater full of homos. No matter how well-hung your flat-panel TV might be, it's not the same."

Then too, the Frameline festival serves up a bounteous buffet of wide-ranging cinematic dishes, from a Filipino story of male strippers to a progrram of short films about female-to-male transsexuals. The Bubble, by noted gay Israeli director Eytan Fox, touchingly recounted a Romeo-and-Juliet romance between a Jew and a Palestinian. The American film 25 Cent Preview was a brutal look at the gritty life of a San Francisco hustler. And the moody Argentinian film Glue followed the aimless wanderings of three cute teenagers, proving that a little grainy handheld camerawork goes a long way...and giving rise to the suspicion that the film veers close to Larry Clark-style chickenhawk eroticism. (Regardless,Glue won the prestigious jury award for Best First Feature.)

Not everything on view was downbeat and/or subtitled, though. One crowd favorite, Outing Riley, the gently humorous story of a guy coming out to his Irish Catholic family (complete with a fairy tale ending) proved a perfect date movie–and was written and directed by its straight star. Q. Allan Brocka, a festival favorite, brought two episodes of his new–and truly funny–animated TV series Rick & Steve, The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World. And Suffering Man's Charity, starring and directed by noted gay actor Alan Cumming, dished up comedy so relentlessly over the top as to make at least one viewer wish that someone besides Cumming had been at the helm, the better to rein in his very, um, enthusiastic performance.

In years past, the festival was a place to catch the latest work of cutting-edge auteurs like John Greyson and Gus Van Sant, or be the first to see what was called, in the 1990s, "The New Queer Cinema," films by such directors as Tom Kalin, Todd Haynes, Greg Araki, and the late Derek Jarman. While Van Sant went on to direct Good Will Hunting and a superfluous remake of Psycho, many of the other filmmakers' careers have stalled, and none of the films I saw this year approached the "My God, what a revelation!" status of Greyson's Lilies or Jarman's Edward II. (On the other hand, none provided the scandal of the festival screening of Todd Verow's Frisk.)

Who knows? Maybe the whole gay narrative genre is–for the moment at least–played out. Brokeback Mountain and Outing Riley notwithstanding, how many more films about being in the closet and/or coming out do we really need?

Where the festival did shine–as it often does–is in the realm of documentaries. A steady diet of fictional coming-out stories and fluffy boy-fucks-boy romance can pale, but there always new, true stories to be told. And sometimes the stories aren't even new. The Fall of '55 fascinatingly (if somewhat overcautiously) told the story of a once-notorious sex scandal that hit Boise, Idaho over a half-century ago.

Fast-forward to age of gay liberation, and The Godfather of Disco recounted the story of the founder of New York's famed dance club, The Paradise Garage. The soundtrack was fun, and the plethora of intereviews with DJs was plentiful enough to satsify hardcore disco aficionados (though perhaps a bit too much for the rest of us). But, as we all know, the party stopped when HIV came in the door, and the documentary unfinchingly dealt with that, as well.

It was, in fact, one of the few appearances of AIDS at this year's fest; the epidemic, once a mainstay of gay cinema, is now, apparently, rather passé. Andre Techine's retro viral soap opera The Witnesses, set in 1980s France, was the only fictional feature in which HIV was the central subject. And the short Invulnerable effectively told the story of a positive schoolteacher. But in the rather sweet if ultimately somewhat unsatisying Holding Trevor, it was the straight woman, not any of the gay men, who ended up infected. It's as if improved treatments have pushed this still-central fact of queer life to the margin of most filmmakers' attention.

On the other hand, gender issues remained hot. Nearly four times as many festival films dealt with transgenderism as with AIDS, and while Alexis Arquette: She's My Brother got the lion(ess)'s share of attention, another feature-length documentary, Red Without Blue, proved an audience favorite, too: It told the story of twin brothers, one of whom transitions to female, and its soul-bearing honesty was near-overwhelming.

There were a number of films about religion, including Fall From Grace, which showed homophobic preacher Fred Phelps and his cult-like clan in all their wormy splendor. And yet another documentary, Semper Fi, got a sustained standing ovation for its tale of a gay Marine who goes to Iraq, becomes disenchanted, comes home, and comes out. While an inspirational figure in some ways, the Marine, Jeff Key, is also problematic–he willingly adhered to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and volunteered for a war many queers viewed as immoral and wrongheaded from the start. (Showtime subscribers can decide for themselves, as it's on view on pay cable.)

One thing that wasn't on view much was dick–both literally and figuratively. The only actual dicks I remember seeing were in the so-cheesy-it-must-be-camp crime drama 2 Minutes Later…and they were all soft. (OK, I did, I confess, miss the "uninhibited sex comedy" provocatively titled A Four Letter Word, as well as a documentary on notorious photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. And I had to pass up the promising clip show on cheesy lesbian sexploitation films, though–at the risk of seeeming phallocentric–that one was about clits, not dicks. And hey, at a festival, especially one with over 200 films, you can't see everything.) While lots of fictional films I did see featured sex scenes, they usually weren't any more explicit (or revealing) than what's on view on F/X shows like Nip/Tuck. Yes, there was a half-hour documentary on the making of Shortbus–though that was stuck into a cross-gender program, presumably due to Justin Bond. But there was nothing I caught that was remotely like the flawed-but-groundbreaking, sex postive, utterly graphic Shortbus itself.

Sure, we gay guys are more than our crotches, and Frameline recognizes that. In the promo material, there were about a dozen films apiece classified under "Aging," "Marriage," and "Parenting." But there wasn't even a classification for "Sexuality." In the past, the festival has shown documentaries on early beefcake magazines, SM, and other erectile subjects, and noted theorist Richard Dyer even hosted an evening deconstructing porn. This year, male/male "sexuality" was usually part of a hyphenated topic, e.g., "sexuality-and-guys-on-the-downlow."

But hey, the festival can't show films that haven't been made. Maybe it's just special pleading on the part of a guy who writes smut for a living, but would it be too much to ask that queer filmmakers look squarely at sex with the same avidity they investigate same-sex child-rearing, gender-crossing shamans, and gay rights in Cuba?

Well, maybe it is...