“I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.”
The Rocky Horror Picture Show isn't just a film with great songs, amazing costumes, and
muscles.
It's also a declaration of sexual freedom, of coming out, and giving yourself over to
absolute pleasure.
This is a story about the night the Rocky Horror Picture Show changed my life.
All aboard and welcome to Matt Baume’s culture cruise, where we take a deep dive on LGBT
themes on TV, in movies, in books, games, and more.
This time we’re looking at 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its subversive themes
of eroding heterosexual tradition, finding your fellow weirdos, and the awakening of
queer desire.
Culture Cruise is supported by folks who pledge a dollar or more a month on Patreon -- folks
like Andrew Zur -- thanks Andrew!
There’s rewards for backers, head over to Patreon.com/mattbaume or click the link in
the description to join the folks who make Culture Cruise possible.
The Rocky Horror Picture show was a huge failure, at least when it premiered.
It was too weird, too queer, too musical at a time when moviegoers stopped caring about
showtunes.
But within a few years, it found a new life as an underground phenomenon.
Here’s how a Rocky screening is depicted just five years later in the movie Fame: it’s
become an institution for weirdos where everyone dresses up, shouts along, participates in
rituals -- like a Catholic mass but for drama club kids.
So how did that happen?
Well ...
Rocky Horror starts in a suburban utopia.
Straight people are getting married, like they do, and everything is so very traditional.
Especially Brad and Janet.
"Uh, everyone knows that Betty is a wonderful little cook."
But behind the familiar old institutions lurks something sinister.
Brad and Janet declare their love on the edge of a graveyard, and they're being watched
over by someone ... creepy.
And on a dark and stormy night, their car breaks down and they stumble into a world
they never knew existed -- and sexual desires they never know how to acknowledge.
The first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show was dark and stormy as well.
I was caught in a blizzard... at a party... in a mansion.... with a sexy man.
And by the time I watched the sun come up in the morning I'd been stripped of nearly
everything I'd arrived with.
A little context: In high school, I WAS Brad and Janet.
I grew up next to a cemetery, and was raised to be well-behaved, polite, stuffy, and pretty
square.
"Any of you guys know how to Madison?"
Rocky Horror entered my life a few days before Christmas at a drama club party, held at a
rich kid's family mansion on top of a hill.
There was a blizzard and I nearly didn't make it, but when I arrived, everyone was in the
basement watching an old VHS copy of Rocky Horror.
There was a couple making out on a sofa.
Some other kids were smoking pot.
There was loud music.
I would probably have left if not for the blizzard.
I had no idea what I'd just stumbled into.
"It's probably a hunting lodge for rich weirdos."
It's the same vibe that Brad and Janet find themselves walking into.
Unfamiliar.
Scary.
Dangerous.
And yet there's something about it that's hard to resist.
When everyone starts dancing, even the stuffy criminologist joins in -- with instructions
and everything.
"It's just a jump to the left."
Still, at that party I felt incredibly nervous, and was a little jealous of Janet when she
fainted and didn't have to worry about making small talk.
I was lucky, though -- there was a cute senior at the party named Patrick who I sort of knew,
and he taught me the dance as it happened.
I thought I'd figured out what this movie is -- oh, okay, it's a good old fashioned
traditional musical, right?
And then... this happens.
“I'm just a sweet transvestite!”
This is Dr. Frank N Furter, the host of the party, and he kind of broke my brain when
I first saw him.
He's not a drag queen, exactly; he's not masculine, exactly; he's not anything EXACTLY.
He's physically a boy, but flamboyant and queer and totally unashamed, and he was everything
I wished I wasn't afraid to be.
Back then, I was still closeted.
Embarrassed enough about my skin, my hair, my voice -- I wasn't eager to come out and
give myself something else to be self-conscious about.
The extent of my flirting with boys was asking if I could borrow a pen, then putting the
cap in my mouth when I wrote, imagining that they had done the same so it was like we were
making out in a three-way with the pen.
This was, in hindsight, a sign of some slight sexual repression.
The party guests in the movie are not repressed, and I was so jealous.
They're having fun, and Frank N Furter is having the most fun of all.
Brad and Janet, in contrast, don't even seem to know they're in the musical.
“I'm glad we caught you at home.
Could we use your phone?”
Rocky Horror came out at a particularly tumultuous time for queer folks -- 1975.
Fifteen years earlier was the end of the 1950s…
“The problem of homosexuality is age old.
In ancient Greece and Rome, this condition was apparently accepted as a way of life.
In this country the opposite is true.”
Fifteen years later was the start of the 1990s.
“Everyone wants someone to grow old with and shouldn’t everyone have that chance?”
Sophia I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“I don’t think you do.
Blanche, would you marry me?”
Rocky Horror sits halfway between a time when queer people were arrested, beaten, and even
given lobotomies; and a time when we queer people could fight for the right to live the
lives of their choosing.
When I saw the contrast between the stuffy straights and the dancing guests, I knew exactly
which side I wanted to be on.
Brad and Janet get stripped out of their wet clothes, I wanted that to happen to me -- I
wanted someone to come along and pull away every piece of my heterosexual disguise -- which
was, admittedly, already quite flimsy.
I wanted to say what I was out loud.
I wanted to be ...
“...vulnerable.”
The film started firmly in rooted in heterosexual traditions.
And now, that's being slowly dissolved as the party grows ever more queer.
Dr. Frank N Furter unveils his monster -- essentially a gay pride mummy, which when unwrapped is
a pure sex object.
“Well, Brad and Janet, what do you think of him?”
“Well, I don't like men with too many muscles.”
“I didn't make him for you!”
I gasped when I heard that line.
If this muscle man wasn't for a woman, who is he for?
Oh, he's for men.
This is an object of desire designed for a gay gaze -- as a sheltered teen, I had never
seen anything like that.
And a lot of audiences in the mid-70s probably hadn't either.
Eventually, the movie introduces Meat Loaf as Eddie to add a little heterosexual counterpoint.
It's probably not a coincidence that the party I was at drifted away from the screen during
his scene.
A couple people broke away to play spin the bottle, and when Patrick the senior joined
them, I decided I needed to as well.
That's how I had my first kiss with a boy, accompanied by Meat Loaf on the saxophone.
I remember thinking, Oh my God, what did I just do?
Was it wrong to kiss a boy?
Fortunately, the movie has an answer to that.
“There's no crime in giving yourself over to pleasure.”
That might be the most important line of the film.
Give yourself over to pleasure.
Have fun.
Don't be afraid of feeling good.
For a closeted kid in the 90s, those words had incredible power.
Imagine the power they must have had in the 70s, when the film first came out.
It was just a few years after Stonewall, homosexuality was a crime in most of the country, many doctors
still considered it a mental illness.
The social pressure to be straight, to never give yourself over to anything pleasurable,
was overwhelming.
So it's no surprise that Rocky Horror was a commercial flop when it first came out.
But then it found a new life as a midnight movie.
When the film screened at weird hours in weird theaters, it drew crowds of weird people who
dressed up, re-enacted the dances, and shouted at the screen with new dialogue.
These were folks hungry for something queer on screen.
They might look unremarkable by day, but by night they could reveal themselves.
Here's a teenager talking about the movie's fans in 1978:
"We're all quite normal really."
That's Michael Stipe by the way, 18 years old, before he formed the band REM.
Not a bad look for him.
Whether in the 70s, the 90s, or today, Rocky Horror is a movie by, for, and about people
who feel like aliens and outsiders.
And the movie says to them, don't worry, you're not alone -- people like us can find each
other, at parties in the movie and at parties in real life.
And once you do, you can drop the exhausting attempts to blend, stop hiding who you are
and what you want, and just ... give yourself over to pleasure.
Like this:
"T-t-t-t-t-t-touch me"
I was sitting next to Patrick when this song came on, and I kept wishing that, as with
the Time Warp, he'd help me re-enact it.
But instead, he grew bored with the movie and went upstairs to cause some mayhem.
I followed him just in time to see him walk into an indoor pool, fully dressed, because
he thought it was funny.
It was actually more hot than funny.
Way hotter than the pool scene that I was missing in the movie downstairs.
Eventually someone found him a towel and dry clothes, and I stood outside the bathroom
and listened to him get dressed, wondering what to say, while a song floated up from
the basement.
"Don't dream it, be it."
Those voices, chanting over and over "don't dream it, be it" -- they were telling me exactly
what I needed to do.
Rocky Horror ends with the party clearing away, the house blasting off, and the survivors
staggering out into the morning sun.
They might return to their dreary lives, but it’s unlikely they’ll forget what they’ve
been through.
And at my party, the sun was just coming up when a couple of us decided to go for a walk.
We all bundled up in winter coats and went outside.
The snow was fresh and blue with 5am light, and there was a little bit of a mist rising
off of it as we trudged through the woods around the house.
Out of nowhere, Patrick asked me, do you call yourself gay or homosexual?
For a moment I heard those words again -- "Don't dream it, be it."
And I said, "I'm queer," he said "okay," that was it.
I was out.
It was so easy.
I kept waiting to feel embarrassed, now that I'd said it out loud, but it never came.
I did what the movie said.
In the year that followed, I had my first boyfriend, and my first kiss that hadn't been
assigned to me by a random lucky bottle spin.
I went from the background of the chorus to the lead in the next year's school play -- Jesus
in Godspell, which I played as flamboyantly as possible, essentially the Messiah by way
of Frank N Furter.
I started dressing loud, and adopted a truly mortifying hairstyle that would have fit alongside
Magenta and Riff Raff.
At least some of these things I should have been embarrassed about.
But instead I just felt good.
I felt pleasure.
And as Rocky Horror teaches us, there's no crime in giving yourself over to that.
Land ho!
We’re pulling into port.
Thanks for cruising along with us!
And thanks to everyone who makes the Culture Cruise possible with a pledge of a dollar
or more a month on Patreon, folks like Andrew Zur.
There’s some lovely rewards for folks who pledge their support -- head over to patreon.com/mattbaume
or click the link in the description to check out the perks available to backers.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m needed in the Zen room.