Thought For The Day: John Waters

I don’t long for anything. But I hope the main thing we don’t lose is self-parody and a sense of humor, because then we become just mall walkers. There’s nothing the matter with wanting to be a gay, middle-class mall walker — though it’s different values than I have — but so what? That’s the whole point — you should have the right to be whatever kind of gay you want. Gay people can be bad mothers just like straight ones. You have a right to be a bad mother!

John Waters talks to Michael Musto for The Advocate.

Thought For The Day: John Waters

My parents never talked to me about my sexuality. I never came out, that’s like a barmitzvah. I never had that either. Coming out seemed too corny for me. I just thought people could figure it out. I had a boyfriend named Ken for a long time and they were nice about him and everything. Then later, before my mother died, she was suddenly so pro-gay, she was like, “Why aren’t you getting married?” It was like a whole pressure the other way. I don’t want to get married, I have met the right person but I don’t want to get married.

My Family Values, The Guardian - cause you've got to have Waters in one of the weekend broadsheets, it's the law.

Thought For The Day: John Waters

“I’m now for autosexual people. The people who believe that if they have sex with someone else and don’t just masturbate that they’re unfaithful to themselves. I’m for people now that want to marry themselves. That’s the next battle with the Catholic Church. I’m the only person that wants to lead that fight.”

The Independent, cause you can't have a weekend without a (error-filled) John Waters interview in the broadsheets.

PS It Isn't Very Pretty... The Complete Films Of John Waters, BFI Southbank.

John Waters: Change

While the rest of the world ties itself in knots in order not to fall foul of PC/LGBT lexical updates, Waters happily alludes to Vanity Fair’s post-op cover star as Bruce instead of Caitlyn. ‘The Bruce Jenner/Caitlyn thing is kind of old hat to me. I had a transgender woman in Pink Flamingos. She had breasts and a penis. She got the operation that week. That was radical to me then. Caitlyn’s a Republican, she’s on a reality show, and she’s a Kardashian. We can’t make fun of him or her?’ He’s much more intrigued by girls who are now boys, he says. ‘It seems newer to me. They look like guys I like, so it’s even more confusing. They ask me to sign their vasectomy scars a lot, which I do.’

John Waters interviewed by The Spectator.

John Waters: Is It Porn Or Is It ART?

A mood of nostalgia permeates the exhibition. I ask him to explain an image of a crab. “There’s no such thing as crabs any more because young people don’t have pubic hair any more. So where did they all go? They’re extinct! So I had to bring them back.” He stands back from the image to get a better view. “It’d take a brave collector to hang that above their couch. I’d rather have crabs than bedbugs. You can get rid of crabs in a day.”

Waters is not just nostalgic for being hated then, but nostalgic for old school STDs. Another piece called Poultry consists of covers of old gay porn novels with the word “chicken” in the title and depicting young, nubile gay men in various states of rudery. Each book is from Waters’ extensive collection. “I guess nobody says chicken any more in that context,” says Waters wistfully. “Now the gay slang is twink.”

And then there’s the stroller I stumbled across when I entered the show. The restraining straps look like they’re from a bondage fetishist’s closet, and the seat is decorated with the names of gay clubs including The Toilet and Blow Buddies, the latter with its striking logo of a penis in mid-ejaculation. If only, I think, the gallery had a gift shop, this baby buggy would be a top seller.

This stroller, too, is nostalgic. “Those are all real places that existed in the 60s and 70s. But today in those neighbourhoods, like the Castro district in San Francisco, you see gay couples with strollers with kids. Who’d ever have thought it would happen?” Blow Buddies, I’m happy to relate, still thrives in San Francisco. “So I’m just putting them both together to celebrate the gay world and show things change and become even more confusing.” ...

The Guardian

The interview is titled John Waters: I want to be despised.

Must be frustrating then that these days he seems universally adored.

The exhibition Beverly Hills John is at Sprüth Magers, London.

Don Featherstone: 1936-2015

The inventor of the Pink Flamingo!

And yes, reader, he did get married.

Thought For The Day: John Waters

“I’m rich. I don’t mean money-wise – I mean that I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my professional and personal life. That’s rich.”

Rhode Island School Of Design commencement speech.

Thought For The Day: John Waters

I am 68 and I’ll see a picture of myself in a magazine and think, “Oh my God, you are 68.” But I am a realist. I have always said I collect contemporary art but I don’t want to be in it, and when people ask what photographer I would like to have photograph me, I always say, whoever has the biggest retouch budget!

How I Get Ready, Guardian Weekend.

Hardy broadsheet weekend magazine perennial JW was in sister paper, The Observer, only last Sunday.

Fagburn ain't complaining.

• Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America is published in paperback by Corsair, at £8.99 blah blah blah.

Thought For The Day: John Waters

“Trash and camp just don’t cut it any more. Filth still has a punch to it. The right kind of people understand it and it frightens away the timid.”

Speaking at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, New Orleans, quoted in The Observer.

Think he says a variation on this in every interview these days, tbh.

Travel: John Waters Guide To Baltimore

Fans of Pink Flamingos who want to find some filming locations should visit the corner of West Read Street and Tyson Street. That’s where Divine ate dog shit. And the house where the Marbles lived is on Greenwood Avenue. It’s exactly the same – and I’ve gone back in since, which was weird. The woman that owned it ran a fancy wine shop and had never seen Pink Flamingos. I said, “Well you should see it!” She freaked out afterwards. She said: “Divine was licking my bannister!” Then she moved.

John Waters On Baltimore, Guardian Travel.

Don't mention The Wire! (Geddit??!!)

John Waters: Shock Value

I am shocked by peoples increasing desire to mass conform and belong,it seems even the "outsiders" and the "avant-garde" can only do it safely within their tribe. What shocks you, if anything?

If you are "shocked" by people's desire to mass conform, you must be awfully young! They've been trying to do that since Adam and Eve. What shocks me? Bad romantic comedies.

What "shocks" you?

Racism. Anyone that thinks gay people adopting children is wrong. Oh sure, orphanages are better.

Ever going to marry?

I doubt it. I have no real urge to copy a corny heterosexual tradition, even though I believe marriage can work. My parents had a great one. It's the bachelor party I can't face.

From a Guardian online readers' live webchat earlier today.

Shockingly, these are among the 'highlights'.

Among the questions he couldn't be arsed to answer; do you consider your films as culturally significant in the realm of queer theory? What influence has the struggle for LGBT rights had on your work in the cinema? I work in the world of developing reality television, would you ever consider developing some sort of unscripted show?

FFS!

Divine: Trash

The estate of gay icon and John Waters muse Divine (ne Harris Glenn Milstead) was illegally usurped from his cousins, who are his rightful family heirs, according to a U.S. District Court judgment out of Orlando on July 10. The ruling is a black eye for Michael O'Quinn, who had befriended Divine's mother, Frances, and become her business manager and later was named as a beneficiary to the estate in an addendum to Frances' will. (The estate reverted to Mom after Divine's death at 42 in 1988 from an enlarged heart.)

The court now has ruled that O'Quinn, who has worked as a costumer at Universal Studios' Florida theme park, willfully ignored Frances' will revision in 2008 that bestowed the estate to her nieces and nephews. Noah Brodie, a Warner Bros. studio lot VIP tour operator and O'Quinn's former business partner in Everything Divine, which was set up to leverage Divine's assets, discovered the shenanigans while in talks with a cosmetics firm in 2011 about a Divine-themed line.

"It's such a unique and unusual intellectual property," Brodie tells THR. "I was duped, but eventually [O'Quinn] got caught in lie after lie." O'Quinn could not be reached for comment.

The Hollywood Reporter.

John Waters: Fashionista

Guardian online apropos of nothing.

White Trash: Uncut

Andy Warhol looks a scream...

Christopher Makos' seminal (finkaboutit!) book of photographs, White Trash, has been reprinted with some new stuff.
It costs a rather unpunk rock arm and two legs for about 80 pictures.
But you can see some for free on his website.
Or, you know, maybe try typing his name in Google Image.
The gay sex & drugs & rock & roll loving Telegraph talk to him.

RuPaul Drives...: John Waters

Ru: 'I've always said that people who have uncovered life's twisted hoax find refuge in the irreverent, and twisted and weird. Do you find those people have changed? Are they the same? The ones who flock to the irreverent?'

John: 'They're the same people who've always been my core audience. Minorities that don't even fit into their own minority. They can't even get along with their fellow lunatics. That's my core audience. People in prison with a sense of humour. That's where I always have my best screen tests.'

Fantastico!

John Waters: A Christmas Gift For You

What have been some of your best gifts?

It’s not about the money. It’s about spending the time. A friend once gave me the three-volume set of John Simon’s criticism. That’s hard to top. Another friend gave me a Poor Pitiful Pearl doll. She has a flowered dress and a peasant scarf and looks like Nikita Khrushchev’s wife. She’s a Communist. One Christmas, Dennis Dermody, the movie critic of Paper, gave me “Rock Hudson: A Gathering of Friends,” the master invitation list from Rock Hudson’s memorial service. It’s so great. Everyone’s in it, with personal addresses all bound into a book. Someone else once gave me Ike Turner’s will. I get great stuff.

Are there gifts that got away?

I would love to get Visconti’s ascot, and I’ve been trying for years to get Brigid Berlin to give me a prescription bottle of Obetrol, Andy Warhol’s diet pills.

Is there a John Waters version of a lump of coal?

The rudest possible gift is a gift card. It means you think the person is stupid and has no interests. The only good gift card is Bitcoin. You practically have to be a hacker to know about it. I want a Bitcoin gift certificate. That’s a glamorous gift card. You can use it to buy hit men or drugs.

What kind of gifts do you give?

I always give books. And I always ask for books. I think you should reward people sexually for getting you books. Don’t send a thank-you note, repay them with sexual activity. If the book is rare or by your favorite author or one you didn’t know about, reward them with the most perverted sex act you can think of. Otherwise, you can just make out...

Season's Greetings, With A Wink. New York Times.

Via Chase Madar - whose book, The Passion Of Bradley Manning, would make a great Xmas gift. x

Thought For The Day: John Waters

Before I told [my parents] I was gay they were scared I was about to say I was a necrophiliac or something. "Do you have to say it to USA Today?" my father said. They were fine about me being on the cover of [gay magazine] Out, just not the publications their friends read. My parents were married for 60 years. They never had a fight. They were the perfect example of a good marriage. Now my mother wants me to get married. She'll say: "Why aren't you married to that nice friend?" who is usually a successful guy. But the successful gay men I know rarely have other successful gay men as boyfriends. They have hustlers. Marriage equality is a hustler's feeding frenzy of gold-diggers. I campaigned for marriage equality in Maryland because I believe we should have the right to it, but I personally don't want to get married. I don't want to imitate the traditions of heterosexual people. I hate weddings: they make me uneasy.

The Observer.

Been a while since we heard from this Sunday paper standby.
Mr Waters is appearing at Homotopia in that Liverpool.
He's interviewed on Radio 3 on Wednesday evening.

Telegraph: In Praise Of Grindr

'We Found Love On Grindr'
Apps such as Grindr and Tinder have a seedy reputation - but a growing number of people are using apps built for one-night stands to find true love.

The Telegraph online today joins the Mail in praising gay "dating" sites/apps.
In an article in the Technology section that reads like a press release from Grindr - oddly.
But it is also pleased that The Gays are finding it to look for love and life-long commitment and probably gaymarriage (which the Telegraph is famously against).
Thank the lord they're not using it to get "seedy" gay sex.

“Now what will they call gay men like myself who choose not to be married? There’s no name for us. Will we be discriminated against in our old age? Ah, a new chapter in the gay struggle.”

John Waters quoted in Hollywood Reporter.

PS Compare and contrast to this piece about Grindr in the Telegraph from 2010 - a slightly less positive take.

T'Internet: The Stanford Experiment

It's the height of the silly season, so what better time to put out a press release about some spurious research and/or survey?
Mail Online report on; How the number of American same-sex couples meeting their partners online has exploded over the past decade.
"The Internet has done wonders for gay singles in search of love," writes the unnamed reporter - a sign it's a ripped-off wire story.
"Within the past decade the number of American same-sex couples that met online has grown exponentially, from about 30 per cent in the early 2000s to nearly 70 per cent in the early 2010s."
"The number of heterosexual couples that met online has also grown significantly over the past ten years, but not nearly as drastically as with same-sex couples.
"That number has grown from about 15 per cent in the early 2000s to about 22 per cent in 2012.
"The findings were published in a study in the American Sociological Review titled ‘Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary.’"
Here's the full 50 page study and data breakdown - it's by some bloke from Stanford University, and academics are never wrong, right?
Though the real shock finding here is surely that some gay men actually do use "gay dating sites/apps", for, err, dating?

• And Queerty report on a survey of 2,000 Grindr users; "77% of them want to get married and in a noteworthy sidebar, 4% of them already are. Whoops. Or rather, wee! Still, tradition trumps threesomes with 76% of users saying they want kids and 59% opposed to open relationships."
So sweet!

John Waters: How To Go To The Movies

John Waters in a Kickstarter video raising money for San Francisco's Roxie Theater cinema (and apparent slut pit).

"I get a kick out of the Roxie! And if you don't, I oughta kick your ass!
"On a slow night, if few people are there, you can masturbate in the theater.
"Or better yet, have sex with a fellow ticket-buyer on a really good night there.
"And afterwards, you can have a drink in one of the many alarming bars in this neighborhood.
"The Roxie is what movie-going is all about.
"If you don't give them money, you're an asshole, plain and simple."

Via AfterElton.