When Craig Chester‘s debut movie, ADAM AND STEVE, was released 20 years ago, he was hailed as a New Queer Cinema icon. It was by no means ‘the queer movie’ of the time, as this was the same year that Brokeback Mountain burst onto our screens and picked up 8 Academy Award Nominations (winning 3).  But Chester’s queer rom com does nevertheless play its part in the canon, and despite the fact it never has a full theatrical release, it is the third biggest-grossing film of all time from the TLA Releasing Studio 

In the late ’80s, goth boy Adam (Chester) and his obese fag hag Rhonda (a fat-suited Parker Posey) meet dancing-queen Steve (Malcolm Gets) at Danceteria. Adam takes Steve back to his apartment, where they strip, fawn over each other like the teenagers they are (the actors—one caked in white makeup, the other half-hidden beneath a Dee Snider do—allow our assumption of their characters’ youth to do most of the work for them), and do bumps of cocaine unsuspectingly laced with baby laxatives. When nature calls and Steve takes an unexpected “Hershey squirt” on the floor, and Adam responds with a show of projectile vomiting, Steve runs out of the apartment in horror. Seventeen years later, they meet again and fall in love, oblivious to the fact that they’ve met before.

It’s hardly Shakespeare, and Chester is not Ang Lee, but the timing of its release was perfect when the vast majority of cinema fare that year was the traditional offerings of Star Wars, Harry Potter, War Of The Worlds and The Chronicles of Narnia.  It proved that there was a willing audience for cute queer rom/coms

Twenty years after “Adam and Steve” made its mark on queer cinema, the beloved characters are back in “Adam and Steve: The Second Coming” — and Greater Palm Springs will get the first-ever screening. Writer-director Craig Chester brings the sequel to the Mary Pickford Theatre on Thursday, November 6, just in time for Greater Palm Springs Pride. The film catches up with the couple as married men in New York City, where a Biden-Trump debate viewing party leads to an unexpected journey.

“It’s sort of like the Wizard of Oz. It’s sort of a satire of this moment,” Chester told NBC Palm Springs’ Manny the Movie Guy. “They wind up wanting to go to Palm Springs and settle down there… To me, that’s like gay Mecca.