Huang, who started Queer Lounge in 2004 as a networking and meeting place for gay and gay-friendly filmmakers, said she's never nervous about coming to Park City. "Park City is sort of its own planet." There were three protesters last year, which she called insignificant, but actions like theater owner Larry Miller's decision to pull "Brokeback Mountain" out of the Jordan Commons theater are what sways opinions.

"What happens when Larry Miller pulls a film like that, it tends to bruise the image of the state."

Gay films are helping to broaden perspectives in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual community as well, said James Kochi, 37, one of the characters in "All Aboard!"

Kochi and partner Clay Patane, 34, hope to have a child of their own and went on the cruise to hear of gay parents' successes and struggles.

"We didn't know what it was like to be a gay parent," Kochi said. "We thought this will be a learning experience."

"It's the American dream and we want it too," Patane said. The two live in Pasadena, Calif., and came to Sundance for the screening of "All Aboard!"

As people mingled around the Queer Lounge, one sporting a T-shirt saying "Gay is the new black," Patane agreed that gay filmmaking is seeing a swell. "It's the hot topic right now."

And as Queer Lounge expands to the Toronto Film Festival and hopefully the Cannes Film Festival, Huang says the lounge will help facilitate the empowerment of gay filmmakers.

"It becomes so not a big deal anymore. You're going to have gay skateboarders and gay neo-Nazis. But we want to see that. We want to see gay filmmakers portray that in all different ways."

"I think it will take a long time before we see a gay James Bond," she said. "But we're getting there."

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E-mail: astowell@desnews.com