Feeling sad this morning that everything I embraced as a theater kid and young adult to deal with being a hated weirdo has been appropriated by the QT.
Having grown up in the '80s, things like Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch were all about gender non-comformity and being LGB, and embracing people's judgment as a badge of honor.
Looking back, it's depressing how indirectly both those shows force female fans to access the 'liberation.' Women's roles were either absent or burdensomely sexy. But in our Rocky group, girls were just as likely to be Frank N. Furter or Dr. Scott as Janet or Magenta. It felt more liberating dressing up in lingerie when you knew you were impersonating a man.
Just out of curiosity, I was looking to see what the party line is on both of these shows. Depressingly, both seem to be in that limbo where the essentially gay intentions of their creators have been dismissed so the new generation can reinterpret the material to support queer/trans views. But also most TRAs label them 'problematic.' That means their original intent is being gutted in new productions AND they are still considered inadequately pure. Laverne Cox of all people was cast as Frank N. Furter in a recent revival of Rocky in an effort to bend the knee to the TRAs. I am sorry, but that is just not a role you can play if you are simultaneously pretending to be a stereotypical woman.
Richard O'Brien, who wrote the Rocky Horror Show is transsexual, and on record defending J.K. Rowling and saying a man can't be an actual woman, just his own idea of one. John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote Hedwig, has gone to great lengths to distance Hedwig from trans ideology, saying Hedwig is not trans because he was mutilated and forced into gender reassignment against his will. In the end, he abandons his trans persona, with the implication he has found the missing part of himself and is now whole.
These creators are both still alive. This idea current right now that it doesn't matter what the living creator of something you love meant by it seriously bothers me. It's extremely narcissistic. The old idea that art is in part a form of communication from the creator to the audience has fallen dead out of fashion.
I didn't know Richard O'Brien defended JK! I love him for that. Had to look it up. Here's what he said: “As long as they’re happy and fulfilled, I applaud them to my very last day. But you can’t ever become a natural woman. I think that’s probably where Rowling is coming from."
He's right.