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Frameline launched funding programs to help filmmakers complete their projects, established a program for gender parity in the festival, and re-evaluated the venues in which they scheduled women's films. Lumpkin says, “We didn't have a significant women's audience at the time, but were we positioning the films to build that audience?”

1986 was a watershed year for Frameline in other ways as well. Lumpkin had recently attended the Berlin Film Festival, and came home and implemented a number of changes in the San Francisco event, including launching an annual award for the year's outstanding contribution to LGBT filmmaking. In years to follow, Frameline would honor recipients including Christine Vachon, Rose Troche, Barbara Hammer, Marcus Hu, Divine, and director Pratibha Parmar. This year's Frameline award will be presented to French director François Ozon.

In the last three decades Frameline has grown into the world's preeminent LGBT film organization, premiering and promoting the work of filmmakers like Gus Van Sant, Marlon Riggs, Pedro Almodóvar, and Vachon. In addition to producing the festival each year in San Francisco, it presents a year-round program of events including free monthly screenings of social-issue films at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, members-only screenings, and sneak previews of feature films and documentaries.

Frameline also distributes a collection of over 200 films and acts as an important resource for educators, other film festivals, community groups, and librarians.

Nearly 100 films and videos have been completed since 1990 with assistance from the Frameline Film and Video Completion Fund. Frameline also gives the largest cash awards of any LGBT film festival in the world, including two $10,000 awards, the Levi's $10,000 First Feature Award and the $10,000 Michael J. Berg Documentary Award.

The lineup for the thirtieth anniversary is the most ambitious yet. The festival opened on June 15 with Puccini for Beginners, a new film from Maria Maggenti, director of the classic The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, which itself was the wildly popular opener for the nineteenth Frameline festival.

It then careens all over the landscape with documentaries such as George Michael: A Different Story, Freida Lee Mock's Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, and The Kinsey Sicks: I Wanna Be a Republican, a live performance by the “dragapella” quartet The New York Times called “the hottest ticket in town.”

Feature films include the oh-so-un PC Another Gay Movie and Margaret Cho's new fag hag road movie, Bam Bam and Celeste. It then wraps up on Pride Sunday with a program of shorts and the Amoldovar-esque Queens from Spanish director Manuel Gómez Pereira. Complete schedule and ticket buying information are on the Frameline festival website.

Reflecting on the changes thirty years have brought to the world of LGBT film, from that little community center one-night stand of super 8 home movies to Brokeback Mountain, Lumpkin is most proud that Frameline has put its money where its mouth is when it comes to supporting diversity in its programming.

But Lumpkin's memories of festivals past include lots of parties, stars, opening nights, and fun as well as cultural contributions. He's gone club crawling with Jennifer Tilley (Bound) and Lori Petty (Tank Girl), and attended film festivals all over the world. But his favorite memory is of that risky first year, when the festival moved to the Castro Theater. “It was such a scary thing for us to do. All the festival audiences of the prior five years could have fit into the Castro Theater. We really weren't sure it would work, and of course, it worked beautifully.”

At a May 23 press conference at the Castro Theater, Lumpkin told the audience that thirty years since its beginnings, “having witnessed a remarkable year of queer cinema with Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica vying for Oscar, this year's San Francisco International LGBT film festival received over 500 entries of new queer films from around the world." And that, he said, “is revolutionary.”

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