In the ever-growing library of “must see” LGBTQ cinematic classics, one thing is clear: Audiences LOVE the 2005 gay rom com Adam & Steve.  Originally released on 17 movie screens, the raunchy and sweet film became a hot commodity on DVD and would eventually become one of the highest-grossing releases from its distributor, TLA Releasing. Now widely available for streaming, Adam & Steve continues to attract new fans worldwide, with a much bigger audience than the ones who were lucky enough to see the movie in those 17 screens 20 years ago.  (Don’t you just love technology?) The movie stars Craig Chester as “Adam” and Malcolm Gets as “Steve”.  While so much of pop culture has changed since the original movie first came out (There was a distinct absence of cell phones in the film, but no shortage of [Gasp!] answering machines…), other things haven’t.  This includes the film’s authentic New York City locations, from Amy’s Bread to Marie’s Crisis to the famous Christopher Park/Stonewall National Monument. Some bars shown in the film look almost identical to today’s hangouts in New York City, the ghost of cigarette smoke from nightlife past notwithstanding.  But most importantly, the film was and still is funny, bold, and unapologetically GAY.  True to the time period it was made, Adam & Steve explores the main characters who have long moved past their first challenge (coming out of the closet) to challenge #2: finding Mr. Right (or at least a reasonable facsimile …) That said, the movie does have some straight representation, in the form of Steve’s roommate Michael (played by Chris Kattan) and the lovely Parker Posey as Adam’s fag hag best gal pal Rhonda.  (Fun fact: Craig Chester and Parker Posey share the same birthday: November 8.) Adam & Steve also broke some new boundaries at the time: At the conclusion of the movie, the titular boyfriends get married in a spare-no-expense wedding, even though same-sex marriage wouldn’t be “legally” recognized until 2011.

Actor and author Craig Chester is the writer, director, and star of Adam & Steve.  It is not an exaggeration to say that there was a bona fide explosion of queer representation in the cinema in the 1990’s– but not only because there were more LGBTQ characters on the big screen.  For the first time ever, there was wide visibility of movies made by LGBTQ filmmakers for LGBTQ audiences, with genuine LGBTQ stories to tell.  Chester was at the center of this new wave of filmmaking.  He appeared in many of the indie films which are now regarded as classics and are even enjoying new analyses from a fresh lens in 2025.  These included Swoon from 1991, Frisk from 1995, and I Shot Andy Warhol from 1996.

But back to Adam & Steve… There’s good news for fans of the original movie who were wondering whatever happened to the happily married gay couple.  A new chapter in the pair’s story is on its way to pop culture: Adam & Steve: The Second Coming.  Chester and Gets are reviving their roles.  There will also be guest appearances by some of Chester’s mover-and-shaker friends, including Cherry Dazzle, Nora Burns, David Ilku, Charles Busch, and Michael Musto. 

Craig Chester spoke with Lavender After Dark’s Jed Ryan about the “second coming” of Adam and Steve…

JR: Hi Craig!  Thank you so much for speaking with me.  Congratulations about the upcoming Adam & Steve sequel.  This is all great news!

CC: Thank you! It’s been a labor of love, just like the first time we did this.  It’s been so much fun making it.  I just love all the actors. Nora is great, and getting to be Malcolm’s husband again is nice!

JR: I thought I was always one step ahead of everything remotely related to LGBTQ pop culture, especially if it was about a movie from “those amazing aughts”, when so many of my favorite movies had come out.  But the news about a follow-up to Adam & Steve, from a social media post I read, caught me by surprise.  How did that juicy piece of news get over my head?!

CC: We haven’t really talked about it that much until now. That social media post that you read was sort of a “coming out” about it, I guess! (Laughs) So, you weren’t remiss in not being on top of things!  We just weren’t talking about it yet.  The way this all came together was very organic.  We were supposed to start filming the sequel to Adam & Steve in Palm Springs this year.  We were actually going to start shooting right around now, in September.  When the election happened last November, our investors got cold feet.  Not only did they pull out, but they left the country! I think that’s been happening a lot, but people aren’t talking about it: A lot of rich gays are quietly leaving the country.  So, that threw a wrench in everything.  We were all set to go. The sequel we were going to make was very much like the first movie, in terms that it was about getting older.  And we still want to make that movie!  I was complaining about this to my friend Emily, who worked with Kyra Sedgewick and Kevin Bacon.  I worked with Emily on a TV pilot back in 2016. She said, “Just make something about THIS!  Make it about Adam and Steve running from MAGA.”  And I was like, “That’s kind of fun!”  So, I wrote some episodes, and Malcolm liked them, and we shot a couple of TikTok’s: just short little funny things with Nora and David Ilku, and then it just sort of grew from there.  It became a web series, and we shot 10 episodes.  So now, we have enough footage for there to be a 90-minute feature.  It actually plays better as a feature, I think, when you watch it.  As you know, 10-minute episodes can get annoying with the credits sequence rolling over and over again!  So, now we are talking about doing it as a feature.  It’s set in the future:  Adam and Steve are running from MAGA and hiding in attics, and I go to a gay work camp at one point with Michael Musto and Charles Busch and David Ilku… so it’s kind of making fun of what’s going on right now in the culture.  Everything that I wrote and have been shooting has sort of been coming true… I feel like I’m a witch or something!  At the end, the Rapture happens, except only the gays go to Heaven.  All the Christian nationalists are left behind. It’s very much about this moment.  I don’t know how evergreen it’s going to be as a movie, because it’s very “now”.  But I did movies in the ’90’s about HIV/AIDS which were very much “time capsules” of the moment…and I think that’s fine.  Some things are meant to be that way. I don’t want to give the whole thing away, but we just shot Charles Busch’s stuff yesterday, and… well, it’s really cool-looking!

(Craig proceeded to tell me a few “spoilers” from the new scenes, but I won’t reveal them here!)

It’s really over the top, silly, and absurd… So, that’s the pitch of what this is!  It was never even meant to be. We were doing it because it was fun, and it gave us something to do to occupy our brains with what’s going on in the country.  We are living in this incredibly historic moment: probably the most historic thing that’s happened in our country since the Civil War.  What’s happening right now is a big deal.  It’s just been very therapeutic to be able to do it with my friends: to have something to do right now that’s so fun and satisfying.  It’s so easy to feel helpless right now.  Also, I love political art.  So many in my movies in the ’90’s were about politics, like Swoon… and many of my movies were in response to the climate in the country at the time: homophobia and HIV/AIDS and all that stuff.  So, it feels a little bit like going back to my roots and making political…”camp”, I guess is the word.  So, that’s it in a nutshell.

JR: Wow, that sounds great!  When you started telling me about the Rapture, I thought you were gonna tell me that Parker Posey was playing God in the movie!  That would make a lot of sense, because so many gay men look at her as God already! (Laughs)

CC: (Laughs) That would make sense. Maybe I should do that: Have her come down from Heaven! 

JR: So, you mention the movies from the ’90’s.  Like the aughts, that was also a time when so many of my favorite movies came out.  It was the era of New Queer Cinema.  It was truly an event when one of these movies came out, because at the time you HAD to see them in the theater… and they were so many post-show discussions because these movies were so different and so provocative.  If you missed the movie in the theater, you had to wait six months for them to come out on… (Gasp!) VHS.  Along that line, I’ve always believed that the job of the artist is to break the rules– which is what you were doing then and what you are doing now.

CC: Thank you.  When I think about the movies back then, like Greg Araki’s The Living End, they were just so provocative.  They were controversial because there was a lot of appropriating supposedly negative images.  Sometimes I worry about the fans of the first movie.  The first Adam & Steve was not political at all.  It was just silly and fun.  There was a DANCE-OFF in it, you know?!   So, there will be people who liked the first movie who want that and are not going to get that!  It still has the same whacky sensibility, but it feels more like an Alexander Payne kind of whacky as opposed to John Waters.  It’s really nice to be getting back into this.  I’m really motivated by politics; It’s something I think is fun.  I never used to feel that way. (Laughs) But it makes me feel good to be doing something.  I hope other gay filmmakers and writers and actors start doing stuff about what’s going on right now, the same way we did back then…because it’s really a big deal.

JR: I hope so too!  But also, I remember that even though the first Adam & Steve was silly and fun, there were also those moments where it addressed gay bashing, even if it did it in a comedic way.  It was definitely a reminder how even in a city like New York and a neighborhood like Greenwich Village, it still was considered risky for two men to show affection in public.  You never knew what assholes were out there.  The younger generations may not know that because they weren’t there at the time, and good for them for that.  But we were there, and we do remember! 

CC:  The younger people are about to have their own version of that because of what is going on now with trans people in this country– the way they are being demonized.  Young gays are starting to get their first taste of, “Wait a minute…This is it!”  They are on the verge of having what they are USED TO taken away, whereas we didn’t have that.  We had the opposite.  We didn’t have something that could be taken away. We had something we tried to get. And then we got it.  We got gay marriage and all that stuff.  Now it’s just about the next generation.  I think they are going to have to rise up.

JR: Oh that’s so true!  So, again, without giving to much away, what surprises can fans of the first Adam & Steve expect with this new production?

CC: Surprises? Well, Cherry Dazzle, one of the Dazzle Dancers in the original, is in this sequel as well.  She’s a really good actress.  She comes back in the picture and becomes part of the “Woke Underground”!  She’s really great in it!  So, there’s a little bit of Dazzle Dancer action happening.  It’s a nice tie-in to Steve and her.  There is some fun flashback stuff to our lives in New York.  And there are cool special effects!  It’s just funny gay humor– I mean, there’s a gay work camp scene!  It’s really silly.  I mean, it’s just making fun of all of this shit like the Project 2025 thing.  It’s really a satire of how insane these Christian nationalists are. So, I hope it’s satisfying to people.  I know there’s a lot of that out there right now.  It’s not really about “today”.  It’s sort of like a fantasy about what it could be like in the future: a cautionary tale, but with a lot of whimsy and a lot of camp.  It has all of the sweetness of the first movie, because Malcolm and I still have the same chemistry we had before.  It’s just weird; We both really love each other, and I think it still comes across. 

JR: That’s really great, because my first question to ANY couple– fictional or not– who has been together 20 years would be “Do you ever run out of things to talk about?” or “Are you still physically attracted to each other?”(Laughs)

CC: It’s funny because we come in and out of each other’s lives and we’ve stayed really close all these years.  When you make a movie like Adam & Steve, it’s like you’re tied together for life.  We look different now!  When we made the first movie, we both wanted to be in really good shape, and would both be doing push-ups off camera between the shots!  I think I was 38 when we shot the movie, and even back then I was like, “We’re so old!”  Now he’s 60, I’m 59… so it’s just less about the vanity of it all, because, you know, we’re fighting a losing battle here (Laughs).  But I think that we read as a believable couple who has been together a long time.  Maybe we have that on the screen because we do have this movie which has grown with us through the years.  Malcolm has a husband named Dominick, who’s amazing.  He married Dominick right after we got married in Adam & Steve.  We filmed our movie wedding and then like a month later I was standing at Malcolm’s real wedding.  It was surreal.  They are still married!  Dominick is an incredible partner, and he’s a lot like Adam actually.  Very similar to Adam.  So it’s all weird.  It’s all probably pretty metaphysical!  But the sequel is still about this love story.  At some point in the movie they get separated, and it’s all about trying to get back with each other! 

JR: Wow!  So, anything else you’d like to tell the masses?

CC: The thing that bothers me right now is that we have REAL enemies.  Real life villains in the country right now.  What worries me is that gay culture has kind of devolved: It’s sort of like “bitchy fag” and “Truman Capote”.  Those two. That’s the gay culture right now.  Where are the poets and the Rufus Wainwrights?– although, Rufus is still doing stuff!  But where is THAT kind of gay in gay culture?  Social media is so vast, and drag queens tend to do better on there right now.  That kind of snarky humor is on fire right now– RuPaul and all that stuff.  When I came out, there really was a soulful quality to being gay.  Now, it’s just so bitchy.  I love that snarky bitchy humor. I don’t have a problem with that.  But I think there should be more than just that.  

Also… People are just like, “I don’t want to think about that stuff.  I watch MAGA all day long and I don’t want to see it in a movie.”  That’s stuff like my grandma used to say. My grandma used to be like, “I don’t want to see a drama.  I have to deal with real life all day.  I want to escape!”  I’ve always had a problem with that kind of idea– that “reality is not fun, so I can’t deal with reality!”  I get it, because these are scary dark times.  But to me, satirizing and making a comedy about it is a way of taking the sting out of it and owning it.  It’s like what South Park is doing!  That’s my favorite kind of stuff.  It’s in-your-face, it’s provocative– like you said, it’s like the movies of the ’90’s.  Trust me, I’m down with escapism… but there has to be something else once in a while!

JR: Well, I for one am so excited.  Thank you for speaking with me!

(Photos courtesy of Craig Chester.)

Adam & Steve: The Second Coming will be having an Official Palm Springs Premiere at Mary Pickford Theatre is D’Place, 36850 Pickfair St., Cathedral City, CA on Thursday, November 6th with The Fall Gay Shorts.

ADAM & STEVE: The Second Coming Starring Craig Chester & Malcolm Gets

5-6:30pm 

6:30-7:00pm Reception in Grand Lobby

The FALL GAY SHORTS

7:00-9:30PM (Includes Q& A after our DOUBLE SCREENING)

Double Screening Package Ticket Price: $40.00. Single Screening Ticket Price: $25.00/Per Program.

Produced & Hosted by Paul Belsito & Steven Roche of The Filmmakers’ Gallery/The Filmmakers’ Gallery: Special Guests Screening Series

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