Lips! Lips! We want lips!
The first time I went to a midnight movie1 was when I was either eighteen or nineteen. I still lived in Kansas then, and the midnight movie was playing at the old movie theater on Sixth Street that was rarely open other than for some special occasion. They'd been doing midnight movies for a while before I went that first time, and I was going with a co-worker who promised me I was going to have an amazing time. I wasn't so sure. The line outside the Granada Theater was a bizarre sight--many of them dressed up freakishly, and a lot of them were carrying paper bags full of stuff, which I also thought was odd.
I was about to watch, and experience, The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time.
I had no idea what was to come.
At the late night, double feature, picture show...
The crowd started chanting for "lips" as the lights in the theater went down, and then I saw what they were chanting for, as two bright red lips appeared on the black screen and started singing as everyone cheered....and started shouting responses to the opening credits.
And I liked the song.
What followed was ninety-eight minutes of insanity. I had never heard of an "interactive" movie before, and it really caught me off guard. How did people know what to yell, and when to yell it? They sang along with the movies, and I soon was caught up in it; getting sprayed with water, ducking out of the way of flying pieces of toast and toilet paper and tampons, and it was all so delightfully subversive in terms of questioning gender and sexuality. You still couldn't swear on prime time television shows, and you definitely couldn't say "sex" (I always hated the coy and cheesy ways television writers came up with as a workaround).
And then of course, there was Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-n-furter.
I'd never seen anything like that before in my life...and I howled with laughter as he removed his robe to reveal what he was wearing beneath, and several people shouted in unison, "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Liza Minnelli!"
And after ninety-eight minutes of madness and mayhem, I was a convert. I walked out of the theater with my head still reeling from all the subversion a still moralistic 1970's American culture had taught me was wrong on every level, disgusting sin and decadent morality, and I wanted more.
I bought the soundtrack shortly thereafter, both vinyl and eight-track, and it didn't take long for me to have the entire thing memorized. I don't remember seeing it again while I lived in Kansas--we moved to California shortly thereafter--but I did discover the theater in Fresno that showed it, and I started going weekly. It was more of a production in Fresno--people dressed up and acted out the parts in front of the screen (they tried to recruit me once to play Brad, but I said no; it would be over another decade before I was comfortable enough to wear only underwear in public; I was really uptight). Eventually, after memorizing the film and soundtrack, learning everything there was to know about the movie and play, I finally stopped going to the midnight movies. HIV/AIDS ripped a lot of the joy out of life in the 1980s for me, and once I was out of the habit of the movie, I was out of the habit and looked back on it as a past experience with nostalgia and joy.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the perfect amount of subversion at precisely the right time for me. It opened a world of possibilities to me, but at the same time, it made me very aware that I needed, more than anything else, to get out of Kansas. Much as I loved the movie, those memories of seeing it that first time--and the self-actualization and realization that came in its wake--are also tied up with my growing misery and dissatisfaction with living in Kansas. It's also tied to discovering actual queer people in Fresno, and recognizing that even this little bit of subversion, something I could go see with the straight friends without any questions or fears, kept me going through the early 1980s as everything started turning even darker than they had ever been in Kansas.
Watching it on television just isn't the same, either.
But the movie always holds a special place in my heart--and I imagine it does with many other queers for whom it proved an awakening of their true freak selves--and I became a lifelong fan of all the stars, whose careers and successes I followed...but one is now dead to me forever, and Her Name Must Not Be Uttered....and her being in the film has also kind of tainted its legacy with me.
But seriously, what a great movie. I may write an essay about the movie someday, you never know!