I had no idea what was going on in that movie - why was Johnny Depp collecting his tears in a jar? - but it stirred something deep in my soul. Cable channels played Cry-Baby on a steady loop at 2 a.m. I first heard of John Waters around 2003, when I was in junior high. What if he was surly? Or what if he was boring?
Most famous people don’t live up to our heady expectations, and if Waters was a little more tempered in person than his freak charmant public persona, no one could blame him. Waters couldn’t have known, but while on the Acela to Baltimore, where he has lived his entire life and where many of his movies are set, I was worried I’d have exactly that kind of moment with him. “I still love Little Richard, but there’s a thing where people say never meet your idols. He didn’t have the mustache, he wore conservative suits, said anti-gay stuff,” Waters said.
Little Richard wasn’t the campy, sprightly figure Waters was hoping he would be. But the conversation was a bit of a bust. “He had just put out an autobiography where he talked about being a drag queen, he mailed people bowel movements - he was right up my alley!” Waters told me. This article uses first or anonymized names for several subjects.In 1987, Playboy commissioned John Waters to interview his idol, Little Richard. One of the most proudly illicit and transgressive sex acts recast as a state-sanctioned, guilt-free way to hook up in a pandemic: That’s a perversion worthy of whoever first cut a hole in a wall centuries ago. “It adds to the intensity of the experience for me.” “I find something ritualistic about glory holes, which harkens back to the Catholic confessional booth-but at the same time a deliberate thumbing-of-the-nose at religious dogma,” Van told me over email. His reason for going: the thrill of ceremony. “Clean” and “discreet” sites have always been available, he said, but none of those qualities capture the most appealing aspect of using glory holes. The Forgotten Gay Cable Network That Changed LGBTQ Historyīut Van also seemed bemused by the “pandemic-friendly” framing of glory holes. Madison Cawthorn Thrusting His Naked Body on Another Man’s Face Doesn’t Tell Us Much About His “Gayness”
“We are a sex-positive health department,” he said, noting that the city’s guidelines were inspired by manuals for safer sex from the initial AIDS crisis, like How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. If the role of public health agencies in this reemergence seems odd, Lanza, the New York City health spokesman, doesn’t think so.
At Rich’s station, he said, “business” initially slowed down as the lockdown began, but he’s seen an uptick himself in recent weeks.