From its early days in the 1980s as the Boston Premier Gay Film Festival to this year’s freshly minted Wicked Queer: Boston LGBT Film Festival, one of the nation’s longest-running film festivals devoted to gay themes has a cheeky new name.
Because gay — frequently used with lesbian, bisexual and transgender and shorthanded to a variation of GLBT — doesn’t fully reflect the community this festival aims to serve or the films it showcases, leaders of the all-volunteer festival decided to shift gears.
“Queer is one of those words that at its core means unusual or slightly off,” explains executive director James Nadeau. It opens a bigger gate, he says, “in a way that allows us all to talk about sexuality.”