Grave humor: championed by John Cameron Mitchell, Jonathan Caouette's crazy, confessional film Tarnation is moving gay and straight audiences to tears and laughter.

When he was 11, Texas native Jonathan Caouette filmed himself delivering an astonishing monologue as an abused wife. He was inspired, he says now, by an episode of The Bionic Woman and by his own mother, who by that tram had been in and out of mental hospitals for decades. When he was 12 Caouette smoked a joint laced with PCP and formaldehyde and wound up in file hospital himself. By age 14 he was sneaking into gay bars and clubs disguised as a goth girl. Last year, as a struggling actor living in New York City, he was working as a doorman and appealing for flee in awful student films.

These are not things most young gay men would want to share even with then" boyfriends. Caouette has shared it with the world by putting it all into a confessional documentary, about his family called Tarnation, a work championed by out filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) that became the sensation of the Sun dance and Cannes film festivals. "My life has led to my wanting to come up with some pretty far-out stuff as far as creating art," says Caouette, 31. "So it could be a blessing in disguise. But, maybe not."

Brilliantly edited--on his boyfriend's IMac--from 160 hours of family films, homemade videotapes, and new footage, Tarnation is the anti-Beautiful Mind: an unvarnished portrait of overcoming mental illness and abuse that's gripping, disturbing, and often downright funny--all without that sentimental Hollywood gloss. "It's about how being a freak, inadvertently, can save you from the dark circumstances in which you might find yourself," says executive producer Mitchell "I think a lot of gay kids can understand that."

As Caouette continues to grapple with music rights for the film's October theatrical release--quirky pop songs are vital to the films ultimately upbeat impact--he spoke with The Advocate by phone from his Queens, N.Y., apartment.

Is Tarnation a "gay film"?

I think it's a film about a lot of things, and I just happen to be gay. So, no. It's probably more My Own Private Idaho meets, like, Grey Gardens or something, with a little bit of Wonder Woman. Gay people tend to want to candycoat a lot of things. We don't like to deal with issues like this. So I hope it's going to be a way for a lot of gay men and women to say, "It's OK to be crazy and to come from this [background]. There can be more dimensions to you."

You've talked about how you always felt like the outsider in your family.

Always. And the outsider in everything: in the gay world and even in the gay punk world. For a while, when I was 8, I thought I was an alien--literally. I just felt so different--not just because I was gay. Just going to my friends' houses and seeing what "normal" families were like--the whole thing just freaked me out. It took me up until the time I was 15 or 16 to realize I was dealing with some pretty unusual circumstances, and that's when I [developed] this real sense of urgency to document everything. It was like, There's some pretty crazy things happening around you--if you don't document it to deal with it, in a way, how are you going to even realize that this is really happening?

From the hundreds of hours of home movies and videos you have, how did you get the film down to 88 minutes?

Piecing this film together was completely organic and almost unconscious. I never premeditated or anticipated anything about this. It was initially this cathartic thing that I was doing after work as a doorman, always knowing that somewhere, someday there might be an audience for this. The first cut was about 2 hours and 20 minutes. [To get to 88 minutes] we just cut out a couple of subplots--subplots that certainly were not subplots in my own life but subplots in trying to tell this story efficiently. One was a subplot involving my mother's second marriage, and then also a subplot--this is certainly not a subplot in my life--about my son. I have a 9-year-old son named Joshua. It's a long story.

What's the short version?

The short version of the long story is, I befriended this girl by the name of Joan. We'd known each other from the time we were 16 up until no--we're very, very good friends now--and got into this really bizarre sexual relationship to wards the latter part of us living in New York the first time. And I don't justify it, I don't question it, but Josh is the re salt of it, and it's very bizarre but very beautiful at the stone time, and I love it. Very Home at the End of the World. Totally.

Except that, unlike in that film, you wind up with a boyfriend, David.

We've been together for 7 1/2 years with no bumps or braises. Go figure. There's hope for anybody. I can't imagine a better anchor in my life. He denotes this sense of absolute innocence in a way I've never seen another 28-year-old have.

What has he brought out in you that you didn't think could be brought out?

He took me back to remembering my innocence, which I thought I lost a long time ago.

For more of this conversation, plus an interview with John Cameron Mitchell, go to www.advocate.com