E-Mail This Article to a Friend Queer as show folk The Theater Offensive gears up for its annual festival BY SALLY CRAGIN

After 13 years, "OUT on the Edge," the Theater Offensive’s annual festival of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender theater isn’t so much offensive as entertaining, and — dare one say it? — uplifting. This fall, the focus is on alternative cabaret and autobiography — and some well-placed nudity. As TTO artistic director and festival tsar Abe Rybeck explains, "All the shows in the main-stage productions are fun and funny as well as touching and smart. Not to mention," he pauses and chuckles, "pretty sexy."

Emerging talent also has a place, and festival alumnae the Five Lesbian Brothers will workshop an original play, Oedipus at Palm Springs. The Theater Offensive’s queer youth theater troupe, True Colors, will collaborate with director Barbara Bickart to create a mixed-media presentation, Turned Up Volume. And there are readings of new plays by local authors. Big names include performance artist (and Jesse Helms target) Tim Miller, who earned boffo notices in New York for his solo show, US, which was inspired by his childhood as what he calls "a big musical show queen." Other acts will be new to Boston audiences, among them the Oops Guys, a cabaret duo from Orlando who present Lounge-zilla: Asian Sings the Blues, and hip-hop artist Hanifah Walidah, who inaugurates the festival with her solo show, Black Folks’ Guide to Black Folks: Your Neighborhood Inside Out.

Walidah plays 10 characters having a typical "day in the life of a neighborhood." Her themes include "homophobia in the black community" and other taboo subjects. "I take an overall view of sexuality as well," she explains, adding that her career as a solo performer extends back to her girlhood as an only child who "had a lot of time by herself, so I’d go into La La Land and wouldn’t come back for hours." In her favorite scene in Black Folks’ Guide, she plays four men of varying ages, all related, who are "dealing with the intense love men can have for one another that they can’t express."

Love and its repercussions is also a them for up-and-coming cabaret duo the Oops Guys. When they lived in Manhattan, singer Fiely Matias and partner/accompanist Dennis Giacino gorged on cabaret — and realized how bad some of it was. Thus, parody. "Instead of singing about love, we sang about stalking," Matias explains. "We thought, let’s sing about the other side of love, and how people can’t let go." Other topics include fag hags and Western notions of Asian culture. (Matias is Filipino.) The pair love audience interaction, and they’ve been known to order pizza by cell phone during their shows.

Writer/performer Tim Miller’s US offers food for thought as it examines the ongoing travails he and Australian-born partner Alistair, who’s under threat of deportation, have experienced: "We’re constantly under the threat of having to pack up and leave." And for the performer, a long-time Broadway fanatic, the prospect of "exile from American justice leads me into considering my hundreds and hundreds of Broadway cast albums that weigh so much." At first, Miller says, he thought that "the piece was all about exile and dislocation and diaspora. And then I realized I was writing about musicals, and it became a core theme." As a child, he had fixated on the cast album of Gypsy, and in US, he talks about wanting "to be Gypsy Rose Lee as a little boy for all kinds of complicated reasons." This latest performance "builds on that desire to be witnessed and recognized in this wild collage of quotes from musicals and political striptease." And yes, Miller is being quite literal about that striptease.

"OUT on the Edge: 13th Annual Festival of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Theater" is presented by the Theater Offensive September 30 through October 24 at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End. Tickets are $8 to $29; $99 for a festival pass. Call (617) 933-8600, or visit www.bostontheatrescene.com