Fort Worth’s queer film festival is making a comeback this year.
Q Cinema started as a film discussion group in the 90’s and grew into a full-fledged festival that welcomed stars like actor Leslie Jordan and director John Waters.
The festival has been dormant since the pandemic, but Trinity Pride is resurrecting it this fall.
That has Q Cinema founder Todd Camp looking back to the festival’s humble beginnings in his southside living room — which today is full to the brim with his collections of toys and doll heads and old beer signs from Fort Worth gay bars.
Camp is not in charge of the festival's resurrection, but he will be showing his Q Cinema relics Saturday in a pop-up exhibit at Trinity Pride Fest. He does all kinds of historic presentations like this as founder and director of YesterQueer, Tarrant County's LGBTQ history project.
He talked with NTX Now host Miranda Suarez about the importance of the festival and what he considers the essential queer films.
The importance of a queer film festival in the 90s and 2000s
One of the things that attracted me to the idea of doing a festival locally was that many of the queer films that we were showing, especially the ones that we showed at Queer Cinema [Camp's film discussion group that preceded Q Cinema], had never really been available for anyone to watch. This was before streaming, this was before we had independent film theaters a little more widespread, it was before the Angelika and all the other things in Dallas. Film festivals were really the only place you could see a lot of these small indie films, especially films with queer subject matter.
What he's looking forward to in this new iteration of Q Cinema
Just the act of showing movies is so much easier now than it used to be. It does not require the sheer level of technical know-how and equipment that it did back then. Everybody's got an inflatable screen in their backyard, and honestly, the quality I've seen of people just doing stuff at home, showing movies, is incredible. It's so much better than what we had access to back then. So I'm looking forward to just seeing things in a lot of different venues and experiencing movies in different ways.
Memorable Q Cinema movies and Camp's recommendations
- The Celluloid Closet (1995)
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
- Beautiful Thing (1996)
You can see the exhibit “Q Cinema: 30 Years of Fun in the Dark” at Amphibian Stage on South Main Street in Fort Worth during the Trinity Pride festival Saturday from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.
If you want to go to the new Q Cinema, it’s scheduled for November 13th through 15th at Amphibian Stage, according to Roger Calderon, president of Trinity Pride.
Miranda Suarez is a co-host of KERA's NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org.
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