Queer year at Sundance. (the Buzz).

CHARLES BUSCH, AL PACINO, JANE FONDA, Gina Gershon, Jason Priestley--the Sundance Film Festival is the place to rub elbows with gay and gay-friendly stars. Eleven years after the advent of the new queer cinema--a phrase coined at Sundance by The Advocate's B. Ruby Rich--queer films still ruled at Sundance 2003, and fans and filmmakers alike added to the party mood at the fest's annual Queer Brunch.

At the table for Party Monster--Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's feature on club-kid killer Michael Alig--costar Seth Green chatted up the press. But star Macaulay Culkin just smiled divinely under his baseball cap. Alig's real-life pal James St. James (played by Green in the film) called Culkin perfect casting. "Mac has that sort of evil choirboy thing that Michael had," he told The Buzz. "Looking at him right now, you like him. He's so lovable. Yet at the same time you know that there are things underneath. Sort of a bubbling bitchiness."

Nearby, at the table for Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald's The Event, down-to-earth diva Olympia Dukakis shared a personal connection to her role as a mother who helps her HIV-positive son commit suicide. "I had a friend, a straight woman, who had colon cancer, and that's what she wanted--and that's what we did," Dukakis said. "It was all very hush-hush."

As the festival went on, Sundance dreams came tree: Writer-director Angela Robinson inked a deal to expand her Charlie's Angels-style short, D.E.B.S., into a feature. Michael Burke premiered The Mudge Boy, expanded from a gay short he made in 1998. Out rocker Cheri Lovedog saw herself played by Gina Gershon in Prey for Rock & Roll. ("The bitch can sing!" Lovedog crowed after the screening.) Drag lovelies Evie Harris, Miss Coco Peru, and Varia Jean Merman packed the house at the premiere of their sassy Girls Will Be Girls.

On awards night, amid all kinds of shout-outs to same-sex partners from the podium, soft-spoken producer Jennifer Chaiken (Big Eden) wiped away tears as her unsparing My Flesh and Blood walked off with both the Audience and Best Director documentary awards. And in a gesture that thrilled fans in gay and lesbian living rooms everywhere, Sundance's dramatic judges voted a Special Jury Prize for acting to drag genius Charles Busch for his turn in his self-penned Die Mommie Die! A delighted Busch confided later that he'd never been so much as nominated for an acting award before. "I don't know what I'll do now," he said. "I've always had this big fat chip on my shoulder. Now I'll have to get all my clothes remade."