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Inclement weather kept the second edition of the Q Film Festival from attracting the large numbers of its inaugural year, but program director Patrick Abadie (pictured above) and co-organizers Gus Bonin and Carlos Perez saw it as a success. “It rocked!” Abadie says. He explains to 225 what the film festival means to him and why it’s not just for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

How do you pitch Q to a straight person?

We don’t have to try very hard. Many attendees brought their straight friends and families. Since we try our best to follow the conventions of the MPAA rating system, Q is 18 years or older unless you’re with an adult. To our surprise several gay and lesbian teens circumvented this by bringing their parents with them. That blew us away. It was heartening to see the pride and love in their parents’ eyes.

What was your role in organizing the festival? Who are the other organizers, and what was their contribution?

The festival was founded by Jeremy Johnson, myself (Abadie), Carlos Perez and about eight volunteers. This year Jeremy moved to New York, and Gus Bonin was added to the board. Additionally our volunteer pool grew to about 24. Gus Bonin, festival producer; me, programming director; Carlos Perez, administration and treasurer.

Does the GLBT community consider Q more than a film festival?

Currently, I think the local GLBT community sees Q as a gay pride-style film festival and is treating it cautiously. The community is still terribly closeted here, and we hope that this will provide an avenue to both visibility and eventually acceptance for our community.

Living in Baton Rouge, do you sometimes feel like someone in Kevin Smith’s documentary Small Town Gay Bar?

In a way, but not really. Our close proximity to New Orleans and Lafayette—both with very strong GLBT communities—does make us feel like stepchildren sometimes, but with Baton Rouge’s continued progress it can only get better for us.

Brokeback Mountain was, for many, their first time watching a love story with homosexual main characters, but was there a film before it that did a better job of this, that maybe was ahead of its time or didn’t get the recognition that Brokeback received?

Brokeback’s depiction of self-hating homosexuals is swiftly becoming outdated, but it was an important film nonetheless.

Do you mean that there are no self-hating homosexuals anymore? There’s certainly no shortage of self-hating heterosexuals.

The generations coming out and coming of age now don’t seem to carry that stigma. Films that play on the old idea that you are gay, therefore you are miserable, are being produced less and less.

And Brokeback Mountain was set mostly in the 1950s and ’60s.

Yes, and queer cinema has a very rich and long history. A prime example of this would be Torch Song Trilogy, where the majority of the characters are comfortable with themselves but deal with homophobia, the rejecting mother and gay bashing. As far back as the early ’80s you have depictions in gay and lesbian films of characters who accept their queerness but have to deal with the reality of intolerance in the outside world.