Romance and resistance. (the Buzz).

WILL ONCE AND AGAIN'S Billy Campbell live happily ever after with Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman's Chad Allen? Can sharp-tongued Bill Brochtrup win over a straight, butch soldier man? Will Judith Light find a girlfriend to share her motorcycle? Such were the questions on The Buzz's mind last month at an intimate Los Angeles reading of The Dunes of Overveen, a screenplay based on the lives of real gay and lesbian resistance fighters in Holland during World War II.

The screenplay, which won the MTV Best New Screenplay Award at Los Angeles's gay and lesbian film festival, Outfest, in 2001, was cowritten by Rich Burns and longtime gay political activist David Mixner. "I found the story in the Holocaust museum here in Washington," Mixner tells The Buzz. "I was taken with this true tale of creative ordinary people rising to great bravery to fight evil." In the staged reading, narrated and directed by Advocate columnist Paris Barclay, Campbell played Willem Arondeus, a gay painter and writer who joins the Dutch resistance against the better judgment of his boyfriend, Gerrit (Allen); Light was Bet Van Beeren, a lesbian bar owner who has her own run-ins with the occupying Nazis; and Brochtrup was campy costume designer-turned-resistance plotter Sjoerd Bakker.

"My hope is that this important story about heroism that happens to be led by a gay man and a lesbian has the opportunity to be seen," Mixner says. With such talent on board (the rest of the L.A. cast rocked as well), The Buzz hopes so too. We're especially eager to see Ms. Light whack a Nazi soldier with a length of pipe. Who's the boss, indeed.