‘One Nation Under God’ a Disturbing Festival Highlight

Although distributors forbade press previews for many intriguing titles in the 11th annual Los Angeles International Gay & Lesbian Film & Video Festival, the films made available for advance screening proved to be by and large an impressive and varied selection.

The festival opens Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., with Derek Jarman’s “Wittgenstein,” a portrait of the influential and eccentric philosopher. It closes Sunday, July 18, at 7 p.m. with Kris Clarke’s documentary on Sandra Bernhard, “Confession of a Pretty Lady,” and at 9 p.m. with Richard Glatzer’s “Grief,” a comedy-drama unfolding over five days in a TV production office.

Teodoro Maniaci and Francine Rzeznik’s “One Nation Under God” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.), surely one of the most informative and disturbing films in the entire festival, is a sobering, comprehensive, well-researched and even-handed account of the attempt by Christian fundamentalist groups--Exodus International in particular--to “cure” homosexuality. The fundamentalists interviewed are articulate but rigid in their beliefs, implacable in their dedication to their cause and unshakable in their conviction of its rightness.

Countering them are individuals who eventually rebelled against the “cure”; key among the observations made by many commentators is a spokesman for the American Psychiatric Assn., which in 1974 declassified homosexuality as an illness. He expresses doubts that sexual orientation can be modified, even if behavior itself can be.

In his sketchy but appealing “Glamazon: A Different Kind of Girl” (Saturday at 2 p.m.), documentarian Rico Martinez follows irrepressible 60-plus stripper Barbara LeMay back to her birthplace, Morgantown, W.Va., where she was born Sammy Hoover. Totally self-enchanted but affectionate and caring of others, LeMay is endearing because Martinez indulges in some arty but amateurish dramatizations of some of LeMay’s earthier anecdotes.

Now that drag queens seem to be back in style in a big way, it was a smart move for the festival to revive Frank Simon’s graceful and compassionate 1968 documentary, “The Queen” (Saturday at 9 p.m.), that captivating, classic behind-the-scenes look at a drag contest that’s a lively mix of humor, bitchiness and all but hair-pulling competitiveness and ego.

This national pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall, is run by iron-willed, show-biz savvy Jack Doroshow, who’s 24 but in his own view “looks 100” when he gets into his glittery older woman finery and comes on, as he says in his apt description, like a “bar mitzvah mother.” These men spend more time than Cinderella’s stepsisters transforming themselves into women. The fragile, unobtrusive Cinderella of the evening, however, is a slim, delicate young man who emerges in a simple low-key gown and makeup as the vulnerable and undeniably beautiful Harlow.

Mark D’Auria’s “Smoke” (Sunday at 7 p.m.) projects a surreal nightmare vision of a terminally anguished hotel men’s room attendant (D’Auria himself) with an obsessive attraction to paunchy older men. D’Auria’s total lack of humor, detachment or irony results in an exercise in self-important tedium.

Far more rewarding is George Matsuoka’s well-observed, beautifully sustained “Twinkle” (Sunday at 9:15 p.m.), in which a young gay physician with a lover and a young alcoholic straight woman agree to an arranged marriage to fit in to conservative Japanese upper-middle-class society to please their parents--and then spend the rest of the film thrashing about attempting to work out some way of life that will be happy for all three, obviously a tall order.

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