With varying degrees of finesse, the short films presented by the LGBT Film Series last Tuesday depicted members of the LGBT community struggling with the challenges of establishing a queer identity in a heteronormative society.

Several of these films, such as Jennifer Thuy Lan Phang’s Love, Ltd., relied on exhausted, familiar coming-out scenarios and frustratingly cliché dialogue, a characteristic shared by Guinevere Turner’s comedic Hung, whose uninteresting camerawork and flippant characters were cute but unable to alter any of the audience’s perceptions of lesbian experiences.

Furthermore, Hung’s plot revolved around five lesbian friends who take a potion allowing them to have a penis for one day, a theme that distorts female curiosity about the phallus into cheap Freudianism. But despite their disappointing aspects, these films and their companions all explored some notable and less commonly examined aspects of gay life in America.

Elyse Montague’s Through the Skin is a startling, hauntingly poignant video-autobiography about growing up androgynous.

Lala Endara’s Saul Searching is a cinema portrait of a teenaged Latino transvestite, who not only begins identifying more and more with men, but tries to emerge in a queer community where most transvestites are white.

In Dan Bree’s Act of Faith, three gay Muslim men re-evaluate their faith, which bans homosexuality, coming to different conclusions as they either abandon or return to Islam and God.

The film that perhaps best pulled together the goal behind all these films was Marlon Riggs’ experimental music video Anthem, which frankly and unabashedly confronted both anti-gay and anti-black societal sentiments by examining prejudice against gay men in the black community. By pinwheeling images of gay sexuality that would prove most shocking to its opponents, Riggs created a work of color, poetry and sound that concluded with a clear, eloquent monologue.

Its message seemed especially appropriate for the evening: Even if some of these issues were overwhelmingly complicated, it was a simple enough act to show members of the LBGT community the respect they deserve.