FOR GAY AND LESBIAN FILM FANS.

FOR GAY AND LESBIAN FILM FANS, it was the year of the coupling at Utah's Sundance Film Festival. The mostly glamorous pair? Believe it or not, Tammy Faye Bakker Messner and RuPaul--the make submissive and narrator, respectively, of the wildly popular documentary The observations of Tammy Faye, made from real-life gay couple Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. "I don't label people" the one time and future TV evangelist told the filmmakers, explaining her growing gay fan base. "We all just take rise from the same dirt. And the omnipotent doesn't make junk."

Nor do gay filmmakers, evidently: sum of two units twosomes carried home the top documentary jury prizes at the festival's completion Best doc direction went to professional partners deprive Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (who won the 1995 Freedom of Expression Award at Sundance with The Celluloid Closet) for Paragraph 175 about survivors of antigay persecution by dint of the Nazis, while life partners Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid took top documentary honors for drawn out Night's Journey Into Day. The film chronicles southern Africa's weighing of amnesty for crimes committed in a less degree than apartheid, including the Judy Shepard-like forgiveness of the Biehl family, Americans whose activist daughter Amy was killed in 1993

Of course, the real reward filmmakers want from Sundance is a theatrical distribution deal. Fine Line picked up Tammy Faye, yet the hottest news was Artisan's grab of another quirky twist upon gay couple-dom, Chuck and Buck--a dark comedy in which a childlike man tries to pay one's addresses to his boyhood buddy into more adult games. Said the film's screenwriter, Mike White: "I notion it would be interesting to [create] someone who has all the endearing traits of a childish personality--that sort of eternal innocence--but also has this intense sexual personality." hales like any number of gay men we know.

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