Notre Dame's queer moment: condemned by the Catholic university's leadership, an LGBT film festival goes forward. But its longevity may soon be victim to the ongoing culture war.

In mid January, University of Notre Dame president and Catholic priest the Reverend John Jenkins took aim at the school's Queer Film Festival. Its name, he said in a speech, implied that the two-year-old event would "celebrate and promote homosexual activity"--an endorsement the Roman Catholic university could not allow.

A campus-wide debate about academic freedom and Notre Dame's adherence to traditional Catholic "morality" erupted, and the film festival's existence was briefly in doubt. But student organizers were undaunted, and three weeks later, February 10-12, the festival took place as planned, renamed Gay and Lesbian Film: Filmmakers, Narratives, and Spectatorships, which at least sounded more academic. Nevertheless, the program was the same: Brokeback Mountain, Breakfast on Pluto, and four other films about the LGBT experience.

"Over the past few weeks on this campus there has been a palpable sense of disillusionment and frustration," Chris Sieving, a visiting assistant professor in the department of film, television, and media, said on the weekend of the program.

The ongoing rancor led to record numbers of ticket buyers pouring into the festival, where all seven screenings--Brokeback was shown twice--were sold out. But did that enthusiasm translate into understanding? Not from what openly gay writer-director Don Roos, a 1977 Notre Dame graduate, observed. "I will never come back to Notre Dame again--ever," says Roos, who has participated in all three of the university's queer film festivals, this year screening his latest film, Happy Endings. "When I come here, all I feel is hate. They don't want me here. They don't want me to have my daughter [in the same home] with my boyfriend. They think I will burn in hell. Would Anne Frank want to go back to Bergen-Belsen?"

The film festival was a much different experience for Notre Dame undergraduate Guillermo Alfaro. "A good deal of respect was shown by all who went to see the films," the openly gay architecture major says. "They went to the screenings to show sexuality should not even be an issue."

Alfaro argued that the students of Notre Dame aren't the people who are harboring intolerance. "I think the hostility mostly comes from the alumni, and then that shapes how the administration reacts to the needs of gay students," he says. "I got the impression, though, from Jenkins's speech, that he was trying to find the nicest way of saying that 'alternative lifestyles are not an alternative at Notre Dame.'"

Festival cofounder and 2004 Notre Dame graduate Liam Dacey echoes Alfaro's feelings, saying that whatever it's called, the queer film festival's long-term existence is in doubt. "It is becoming harder and harder to sustain the required energy to keep up this battle with the university," Dacey says. "I think [the festival] will continue to exist but will be limited. Students will be worn down by all the red tape, and that's what the administration wants--for it to be so hard to run in the future that the organizers will just stop trying."

The impressive attendance at the event may have scared campus administrators and hammered the final nail into the festival's coffin, organizers and participants said. "People definitely are aware [the festival] might not survive anymore after this year," says Roos.

Basile is an ex-Advocate intern and a former student at Notre Dame.