Arts & Entertainment
Polluted Waters
‘I’m like a drag queen on Halloween — if it’s Christmas, I’m working’
John Waters returns to the Birchmere Wednesday. (Photo by Greg Gorman; courtesy Birchmere)
A John Waters Christmas
Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.
Birchmere Music Hall
3701 Mount Vernon Ave.
Alexandria, Va.
$49.50
Legendary film director returns to the Birchmere for his annual holiday show next week and we never miss a chance to chat him up. His comments have been slightly edited for length.
WASHINGTON BLADE: How are you?
JOHN WATERS: Ho ho ho! They used to always say when I was young in the ‘60s they had a march that was, “Ho ho Ho Chi Minh.” Then later they yelled, “Ho ho homosexual.” It could mean lot of different things.
BLADE: Tell us about the “I Am Divine” documentary. I know you participated. Do you feel Divine is finally getting her due with this?
WATERS: I think Divine always got a certain amount of great acclaim. I think Divine changed drag queens. There’s no such thing almost anymore as a normal drag queen. They’re all kind of hip, they’re all kind of edgy, so I think Divine was appreciated. But I think what this movie did — and I’m just a talking head in it but I encouraged Jeffrey (Schwarz) and gave him contacts I had and told everybody to do the film — was really show what Divine was like in real life. People thought he walked around like the Divine character every day, which he never did and he was not a transvestite, he didn’t want to be a woman. He was an actor. He certainly was gay, he was a drag queen but he hated wearing it — it was hot, he was fat, he was sweating, all the time, he said, “Oh the hell women go through.” But I think the movie shows him for what he really was — a much shyer, nicer person. That was a character he played and once we established that character, and turned him around and shocked people more by having him play a housewife, a loving mother, then he got good reviews. And I think it was frustrating to him. I was always happy when he had success away from me … because ‘til the day he died they brought up about the eating shit thing. … I could never live up to it and he could never live it down. It’s true, and so I understand the dilemma he was in. It’s not easy to get parts when you’re a 300-pound man no matter what you want to play but he did pretty well with it, and it’s just a shame because I think that “Married With Children” thing would have been a hit.
BLADE: What’s the strangest question you’ve ever had during the Q&A session in your show?
WATERS: Just recently a woman said, “Have you ever eaten pussy” and I said, “Once, really a long time ago.” And another question at a nightclub in New York, a straight guy in the audience and he was straight, I think, said, “You know I’ve never kissed a guy, can I make out with you?” I said, “Sure come up,” and he was really cute and we did the audience went crazy, his girlfriend applauded. But then — I hate to say this — but then an old leather queen said, “Can I?” and I said, “No, the kissing booth is shut.” But that was a new one for me but mostly no, I think most of the time the questions are pretty good. The only bad ones are when they just want to talk about themselves.
BLADE: You’ve said how hard it is to get financing in recent years. Lots of indie artists and filmmakers are doing these Kickstarter campaigns. Would you ever do one?
WATERS: I wouldn’t. But you know Jeffrey raised a lot of money for “I Am Divine” that way. If I was younger and making “Female Trouble,” you’re damn right I would. But I think for me it’s a little much for me to publicly beg. I own three homes, it’s not like I don’t have a penny. It just doesn’t seem to me that I’m a filmmaker who is struggling to begin, so I would feel uncomfortable doing it but I totally understand why other people do it and I think it’s a great idea.
BLADE: Are you still interested in making films?
WATERS: Of course I have a desire to. With “Fruitcake,” I don’t even talk about it anymore because it’s been like five years and it didn’t happen but I had a really good Hollywood development deal and they liked it and then everything changed. But I’ve been lucky, my whole life, I’m a writer. I wrote all my movies, I wrote my stage show, I’ve written a bunch of books they’re all still in print. Even “Shock Value,” which came out in 1980. Luckily I have several careers and they’re equally important to me. I don’t ever think one is better. I never say, “Oh I’m really a filmmaker but I also write books,” I don’t think that. … I would make another movie in a minute, yeah. But what am I going to do next? Probably write another book. My new book comes out next June. My last one was a best seller. I’ve had good luck with that.
BLADE: What’s the book in June?
WATERS: “Car Sick.” I hitch-hiked across America. It comes out June 3. I just saw the cover this week, it looks great.
BLADE: Has it typically taken any special negotiating to get stars who were well known before your films to be in them? People like the Kathleen Turners or the Johnny Depps?
WATERS: Well if they hesitated, it was maybe with their agent before they met with me. The fact that they had meetings with me, it usually meant they were interested in doing it. I tried to bring up anything they were uptight about in the script, the very first thing. … I think they think the critics even if they hate the movie, it will give them some street cred by not taking themselves so seriously and playing with their image which most of them all do. And if it’s a bomb, I get blamed, they don’t. It hasn’t been that hard. I’ve tried to get meetings with Meryl Streep and it’s never happened but I’ve met her at a party and she was real sweet. I don’t think she’s knocking down my door to work with me. But I’ve had really good luck. The stars that I like are the ones that generally have a sense of humor about themselves they’ve had some success for awhile. The worse ones are generally people that got a huge amount of success in their first project and are young. They’re the ones that need that school that Motown used to have where they teach you how to do interviews and be gracious about success. … Johnny Depp was wonderful. He was at the height of his career but he was giving trouble to everybody but me. He had a TV show at the time and I think that’s why he came along with us — he didn’t want to be a teen idol.
BLADE: So did you ask Chris Isaak if he was going to be comfortable masturbating on the toilet for you?
WATERS: You know I can’t remember. I know that he read the script and it had that in that. I’m sure I told him, “We’re not gonna show your dick.” I don’t know if I said that, but certainly I got along with Chris. He’s pretty much a wild man, he might have shown it. No, I’m just kidding.
BLADE: You’ve spoken before about the influence of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s film “Blood Feast.” Did you see it when it first came out in 1963?
WATERS: Oh yeah. I still have the vomit bag.
BLADE: I can’t imagine how that must have seemed at the time. Were you scared?
WATERS: No, we were roaring. We were on our asses laughing. I saw it at the drive in, which were so different then from the way they are now. Now they’re for families but back then, that’s where you went to have sex, to get drunk and do drugs. We went every night. In the winter when you had heaters in the cars, and that’s when “Blood Feast” would play in the worst weather, like in January at the drive in and everybody would honk on the horn when they saw gore. Today they honk on the horn when they see tits, then they honked on the horn for gore. I was shocked when I first went but we were roaring with laugher. The main reasons we all went was because of this vomit bag, which was a brilliant, brilliant marketing gimmick. … We were shocked because nobody had ever seen a gore movie, that was the first one and it wasn’t illegal.
BLADE: Is camp better when it’s unintentional?
WATERS: Well certainly “Showgirls,” no matter what he says today, he did not mean that to be funny. And that’s why it’s so good. He says today it’s a comedy. I’ve always said with “Mommie Dearest” if two scenes had been taken out … she would have won the Oscar. That’s why the Liberace movie was not camp until he talked about cunnilingus and cancer. I think there are some movies to this day, where it’s hard to tell. I just came back from Liverpool, I did my spoken word show and also had a master movie class on the movie “Boom” with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. To this day, you don’t know if it’s so bad it’s good, the tone is so hard to read. Tennessee Williams said it was the best movie ever made of his material. I love that it’s so confusing. I think Russ Meyer later tried to be campy for the intellectuals and his films are not nearly as good as when he just made them for real people who were just jerking off looking at big tits.
BLADE: Did Robert Maier talk to you about his 2011 book “Low Budget Hell: Making Underground Movies with John Waters”?
WATERS: No, he didn’t really.
BLADE: Did you read it? Any thoughts?
WATERS: Yeah. I’ll just say one thing — I thought it was kind of disgruntled. Kind of sour grapes from someone I thought was my friend.
BLADE: You tour with another show as well, but it seems the Christmas show has a special place in your heart. Is that fair to say?
WATERS: I really do like Christmas, I’m not lying, but I also recognize that many people hate it and it’s a tough, tough time of the year to get through for some. I do like 13 cities and always feel like Johnny Mathis or Brenda Lee doing a Christmas tour. I just love the fact that I’m working. I’m like a drag queen on Halloween — if it’s Christmas, I’m working.
BLADE: How much does it change from year to year on average?
WATERS: I add new material all the time. If you haven’t seen it for five years, there would be lots of new material but even if you just saw it last year, there would still be some new material. I can’t tell you the exact amount but it’s always changing.
Movies
‘Thelma and Louise’ remains landmark of unspoken queer rebellion
Celebrating iconic film 35 years after its release
Hard as it is to believe for those who were around when it happened, “Thelma and Louise” celebrates the 35th anniversary of its release this year.
Deeply popular with both critics and audiences at the time, its reputation continues to ride high; it’s a movie that manages to exist within a nexus of intersecting genres – the “buddy picture”, the “crime thriller,” the “action adventure,” the” “western,” the “neo-noir” – by blending them seamlessly into a crowd-pleasing wild ride of a story, all while delivering a powerful feminist message of outrage, defiance, and empowerment.
And no, “Thelma and Louise” is not a “queer movie” – but it feels like one.
That’s partly because It exists within another genre, too: “lesbian noir,” which blossomed in its wake with films like “Bound” (1996) and has re-emerged in recent films like “Love Lies Bleeding” (2024) and “Honey, Don’t” (2025) – but that also stretches back across decades into the days of old Hollywood, when coded queer characters were a regular fixture in the seedy film noir classics of their time, never overtly identified as such but obvious to spot for anyone savvy enough to read the subtext. That’s why “Thelma and Louise” resonated (and continues to resonate) with lesbian and bisexual audiences who see themselves reflected in its two lead characters, even if there is nothing queer about their relationship — on the surface at least.
Of course, that can be a sore subject; subtext might seem like a “cop-out” for those who long for more open representation for LGBTQ people on the screen – but it’s everything when it comes to recognizing the queerness of older movies (and a lot of newer ones, too), and just because something is not explicitly stated, that doesn’t mean it’s being hidden. After all, most good stories rely on the transcendent power of nuance, which always relies on subtext to shine through. And if any movie relies upon subtext, “Thelma and Louise” is certainly one of them. In its masterfully crafted narrative of a weekend “girl’s trip” that goes horribly wrong, a lot of the most important information is left unspoken.
Take Thelma (Geena Davis), to start with: a naive young housewife whose husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald) treats her like a possession, she blithely ignores his mediocrity and disregards – or at least, pretends to – his repressive tactics to control her, choosing instead to live in a tenuous illusion of “traditional” marriage dynamics; yet when her bestie Louise (Susan Sarandon) offers her a chance to escape for a weekend, she jumps at it – even if she has to skip the part where she asks his permission.
Louise (Susan Sarandon), a bit older and a lot more worldly, is a waitress who spends her days fending off the insults and advances of her male customers at the diner where she works; she sees Thelma’s situation clearly, and hopes that a temporary respite from Darryl will help her recognize the dead-end reality of her marriage. We understand this immediately, even though a direct word is never said about it, and she’s right, of course. They’ve barely even gotten on the road before Thelma’s longing for attention from someone other than her inadequate husband – a honky-tonk Lothario (Timothy Carhart) she meets in a roadhouse where they stop for drinks on the way out of town – leads to an attempted rape that is only prevented when Louise shoots the predator dead in the parking lot.
That killing is the catalyst that turns them into fugitives; as Louise rightly understands, there’s no evidence of sexual assault, just a dead body and a pair of runaway women, and the letter of the law is not on their side. But in truth, that fatal shot is fired not to save Thelma, who has already been freed from her would-be rapist’s clutches when it happens, but because Louise has traumatic memories – and a chip on her shoulder – over something that “happened in Texas,” years before. We never find out what it was that happened, and we don’t need to; our imaginations tell us all we need to know, just as we know that the killing, while it may have been cold-blooded murder, is a justifiable homicide all the same.
There’s more of that subtextual nuance throughout, from the perversely inspiring motivations of hitchhiking hustler J.D. (Brad Pitt, in the sex-on-a-stick performance that launched him on his trajectory to stardom), who takes advantage of Thelma’s gullibility to rob the heroines even as he teaches her the tactics that will soon launch them on their fateful ride-or-die fugitive adventure; to the self-serving “chivalry” of Louise’s erstwhile boyfriend (Michael Madsen) as he casts himself as the “martyr” in letting her go. And yes, even to the benignly sublimated patriarchal programming that drives police investigator Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel in an uncharacteristically empathetic role) to act as the would-be savior of these two “fallen” women, though they want no part of his well-meaning attempts to “rescue” them from the consequences of their choices. And when the two fugitives terrorize a piggish trucker (Marco St. John) before blowing up his big-rig tanker, nobody says – or needs to say – why it feels to them like the right thing to do; it simply IS the right thing, and we, as the audience, know it. What we have seen up to that point has placed us firmly on Thelma and Louise’s side already, and we’re as ready to watch the puerile patriarchy burn as they are.
None of this is spoken aloud, nor is it even alluded to, but it comes through, nonetheless. Chalk it up, if you like, to the power of cinema, especially in the hands of a versatile, stylish, and seasoned director like Ridley Scott, to communicate what is inherently beyond the power of words.
Thelma and Louise may not be “a couple,” but we can’t help but notice as their clothing evolves from frilly-femme to “butch” utilitarianism along the way, or how their connection to the men in their lives easily dissolves without fanfare. And by the time we reach the movie’s thrilling denouement, when all they have left is their commitment to simply stand up against all the things that have kept them feeling incomplete, unfulfilled, and unacceptable, it’s an achingly familiar feeling for any queer viewer who has experienced the same.
We all know what happens, so it’s no spoiler to say that, when they drive off into oblivion in the Grand Canyon, they choose freedom over life itself – and when they head over that cliff, fully embracing their fate as a feminist iteration of the Bonnie and Clyde brand of “noble” outlaws, they seal their fate with a kiss.
At that point, no explanation is needed. Their love for each other transcends anything they’ve felt with the inadequate men in their lives; and in that final freeze-frame moment, when they drive off the cliff and sail into oblivion, we like to think that their car – like Danny Zuko’s at the end of “Grease” – simply flies away into the bliss of an endless summer, and you can’t get any queerer than that.
Out & About
LGBTQ Military Happy Hour set for Sept. 15
In-person gathering to be held at Tom’s Watch Bar
Modern Military Association of America will host “Pride in Service: An LGBTQ+ Military Happy Hour” on Tuesday, Sept. 15 at 4 p.m. at Tom’s Watch Bar.
This in-person gathering is the perfect chance to connect, share stories, and celebrate the diversity within the military community. Come relax, meet fellow LGBTQ+ service members and allies, and enjoy a fun, supportive atmosphere. Don’t miss out on an evening full of pride, camaraderie, and good vibes. Visit Eventbrite for more details.
Friday, September 11
Go Gay DC will host “Out in DC LGBTQ+ Community Social” at 7 p.m. at Hotel Zena.This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Women in their Twenties and Thirties will meet at 8 p.m. on Zoom. This is a social discussion group for queer women in the Washington, D.C. area. For more details, visit Facebook.
Saturday, September 12
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center will host screenings of “Princess Sparkles” and “Kiloran Bay” at 1:30 p.m. “Kiloran Bay” is a 13-minute musical short set amid the wild beauty of the Scottish Hebrides and the fierce joy of a wedding cèilidh. “Princess Sparkles” is about a girl who accidentally signs up to pet-sit a princess only to discover she’s actually a nippy, Fox News-watching pig. More details are available on the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
Sunday, September 13
“Nellie’s DC Drag Brunch” will be at 12 p.m. at Nellie’s Sports Bar. Come get served like a queen by a queen. Join Sapphire Blue, Deja Diamond and their team of amazing drag performers for the most fun you’ll have all weekend. Tickets are $58.51 and are available on Eventbrite.
Monday, September 14
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10:00a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Tuesday, September 15
Center Bi Pan+ Roundtable will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is an opportunity for people to gather in order to discuss issues related to bisexuality or as Bi individuals in a private setting. Visit Facebook or Meetup for more information.
Wednesday, September 16
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center will host “Movement for Healing” at 3 p.m. This trauma- and yoga therapy–informed class is designed to help guests gently reconnect with their body and their breath. Through mindful movement, somatic awareness, and grounding practices, guests will explore how to release tension, increase mobility, and cultivate a deeper sense of safety and ease within. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Thursday, September 17
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5:00 pm if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breathwork and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
‘Thelma and Louise’ remains landmark of unspoken queer rebellion
Comings & Goings
LGBTQ Military Happy Hour set for Sept. 15
Calendar: September 11-17
Multi-billion-dollar 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund to continue until 2090
Md. groups receive state grants to fight hate crimes
Nominate your favorites for the Blade’s 25th annual Best Of LGBTQ DC Awards
Gloria Steinem’s life of substance and consequence
PHOTOS: SUNFESTIVAL
