Displaying Future Posts Using a Custom Select Query

This question revolves are the codex article, Displaying Posts Using a Custom Select Query.

I’m using a category to display upcoming events by using <?php query_posts('showposts=10&post_status=future'); ?> on the specific categories template.

So what I’m trying to do is have custom fields for the speakers for the events. I want to create a page for each speaker, with a list of the upcoming (and previous but that’s easy) events.

However the query used in the codex uses wposts.post_status = 'publish' (which works great for past events) but if I use wposts.post_status = 'future' it displays the display else.

What can I do?