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livRIP Tim Curry. I have read so many articles, new and old, following his death, about how The Rocky Horror Picture Show was so formative for so many people for the whole of its 50 year run. So many isolated Queer people who found their people at the screenings, so many who discovered new gender possibilities that were barely visible anywhere else beyond this one amazing piece of art that broke all the rules.
I want to tell you that I saw RHPS in the wrong circumstances, and all it did was terrify me. But it's not the show's fault, it's everything else about the society I grew up in. So in 1990, as a very sheltered not-quite-teen, I had never heard of RHPS, and importantly I had also never heard of trans people, and the only thing I really knew about kink was silly logic puzzles about whether it's more cruel to deny pain to a masochist than to hurt them. I was away at Jewish summer camp, and some of the counsellors decided to screen the film.
The thing is that the youth leaders were teenagers themselves, they had no idea how to support younger kids of any sexuality, and they just as much as us lived in a world where schools were banned from mentioning gay relationships positively and there was no internet and no mainstream media ever talked about these things. So being a few years older probably didn't give them a great deal more knowledge than I had. I don't know if their intention was to be edgy and inappropriate by showing the film to campers who were really too young for it, or if they were trying to send a subtle message of support to those of us who might be uncomfortable with the compulsory heterosexuality of the Jewish youth movement world.
What actually happened was that I was completely terrified. Not really by the horror, I didn't watch many horror movies and I didn't know what camp was a concept, but I had barely enough genre awareness to understand that it was supposed to be a parody and you weren't meant to take the monsters seriously. But how it read to me was as a continuation of the homophobic bullying that I was starting to be dimly aware might be applicable to me. The constant threat to boys who are even a tiny bit effeminate, or even if they're not but they're a bit dorky and not accepted by the popular crowd, that at any time bullies could decide to expose them to the worst possible humiliation: treating them like girls. And being put in the girl category carries the implication: you can be raped. All of my surroundings were pounding home the message that being female means being in danger from predatory men. Just constant drum-beat, the terrible "self-defence" classes which just taught us we were prey, and all the stranger danger nonsense. The ever-repeated warnings against ever making connections with anyone male, because at best they would get you pregnant and then dump you, and if you were unlucky they would use violence, not persuasion and false promises, to achieve that. If you put together the message that everybody is straight, and that being female means being subordinate to men and just hoping futilely that they wouldn't hurt you, meant that it wasn't even possible to contemplate the existence of a category of being female and not straight.
So I didn't see in RHPS a possibility of AMABs being able to explore femininity, I didn't learn that "transsexual" was a reasonable thing that a person could be, I didn't see bi or other Queer representation. I saw sexualized, fetishized parodies of femininity, and I saw male characters being forced into these sexy outfits against their will, and I saw a lot of sexual encounters that, in my childish vague understanding of sex, didn't look at all consensual. There wasn't anybody I could talk to about this terror. Everybody around me was laughing and apparently enjoying the film, which to me looked as if they were on the side of the bullies. Admitting I found the film really frightening would be admitting that I wasn't cool, and the everyman characters Janet and Brad made me think that being uncool gave everybody around you a licence to be horrible to you. (The whole "virgin" thing didn't help; virgin was a playground insult that basically meant you were childish and behind on popular culture, even though someone suspected of being sexually active for real would have faced far worse ostracism.) And I couldn't go home and talk to trusted adults about it, because adults with any sort of responsibility for children had to be very very careful not to mention anything gay, so it seemed obviously unsafe to admit that I had seen a film with gay themes.
I think mainly I was too young; if I'd seen RHPS at 14, rather than 12, I would probably have been more detached from it. From an adult perspective I don't blame the film at all; it was absolutely trying to give people a glimpse of a different world and possibilities that were otherwise heavily censored. I am glad for the people who did get from it what it offered. The problem was the homophobic culture I grew up in, the mixture of hiding any useful factual information, and the barely hidden threat towards anyone who didn't fully fit the strict gender boxes. I definitely internalized a lot of that homophobia and seeing RHPS in the wrong circumstances really reinforced that. It meant that for a long time even when I was more informed and understood myself as bi, I was afraid, actually afraid, not in the sense of homophobia which is just a polite term for prejudice, of expressions of Queer sexuality that use the kind of idiom that RHPS uses, fishnets and corsets and exaggerated makeup and joyful, unhidden sexiness generally.
Don't have a conclusion, really, just reading a lot of the very well deserved praise of the late Tim Curry's oeuvre is rather strongly casting me back to this disturbing moment when I was a kid. I don't think that today's 12yos should be "protected" by even more censorship and keeping them away from any hint of sexuality other than men and women getting married in order to make babies. Rather the opposite, they should have the context to be able to understand transgressive art. And they should feel safe to talk to adults if they do accidentally see something that they're too young to process properly.
I want to tell you that I saw RHPS in the wrong circumstances, and all it did was terrify me. But it's not the show's fault, it's everything else about the society I grew up in. So in 1990, as a very sheltered not-quite-teen, I had never heard of RHPS, and importantly I had also never heard of trans people, and the only thing I really knew about kink was silly logic puzzles about whether it's more cruel to deny pain to a masochist than to hurt them. I was away at Jewish summer camp, and some of the counsellors decided to screen the film.
The thing is that the youth leaders were teenagers themselves, they had no idea how to support younger kids of any sexuality, and they just as much as us lived in a world where schools were banned from mentioning gay relationships positively and there was no internet and no mainstream media ever talked about these things. So being a few years older probably didn't give them a great deal more knowledge than I had. I don't know if their intention was to be edgy and inappropriate by showing the film to campers who were really too young for it, or if they were trying to send a subtle message of support to those of us who might be uncomfortable with the compulsory heterosexuality of the Jewish youth movement world.
What actually happened was that I was completely terrified. Not really by the horror, I didn't watch many horror movies and I didn't know what camp was a concept, but I had barely enough genre awareness to understand that it was supposed to be a parody and you weren't meant to take the monsters seriously. But how it read to me was as a continuation of the homophobic bullying that I was starting to be dimly aware might be applicable to me. The constant threat to boys who are even a tiny bit effeminate, or even if they're not but they're a bit dorky and not accepted by the popular crowd, that at any time bullies could decide to expose them to the worst possible humiliation: treating them like girls. And being put in the girl category carries the implication: you can be raped. All of my surroundings were pounding home the message that being female means being in danger from predatory men. Just constant drum-beat, the terrible "self-defence" classes which just taught us we were prey, and all the stranger danger nonsense. The ever-repeated warnings against ever making connections with anyone male, because at best they would get you pregnant and then dump you, and if you were unlucky they would use violence, not persuasion and false promises, to achieve that. If you put together the message that everybody is straight, and that being female means being subordinate to men and just hoping futilely that they wouldn't hurt you, meant that it wasn't even possible to contemplate the existence of a category of being female and not straight.
So I didn't see in RHPS a possibility of AMABs being able to explore femininity, I didn't learn that "transsexual" was a reasonable thing that a person could be, I didn't see bi or other Queer representation. I saw sexualized, fetishized parodies of femininity, and I saw male characters being forced into these sexy outfits against their will, and I saw a lot of sexual encounters that, in my childish vague understanding of sex, didn't look at all consensual. There wasn't anybody I could talk to about this terror. Everybody around me was laughing and apparently enjoying the film, which to me looked as if they were on the side of the bullies. Admitting I found the film really frightening would be admitting that I wasn't cool, and the everyman characters Janet and Brad made me think that being uncool gave everybody around you a licence to be horrible to you. (The whole "virgin" thing didn't help; virgin was a playground insult that basically meant you were childish and behind on popular culture, even though someone suspected of being sexually active for real would have faced far worse ostracism.) And I couldn't go home and talk to trusted adults about it, because adults with any sort of responsibility for children had to be very very careful not to mention anything gay, so it seemed obviously unsafe to admit that I had seen a film with gay themes.
I think mainly I was too young; if I'd seen RHPS at 14, rather than 12, I would probably have been more detached from it. From an adult perspective I don't blame the film at all; it was absolutely trying to give people a glimpse of a different world and possibilities that were otherwise heavily censored. I am glad for the people who did get from it what it offered. The problem was the homophobic culture I grew up in, the mixture of hiding any useful factual information, and the barely hidden threat towards anyone who didn't fully fit the strict gender boxes. I definitely internalized a lot of that homophobia and seeing RHPS in the wrong circumstances really reinforced that. It meant that for a long time even when I was more informed and understood myself as bi, I was afraid, actually afraid, not in the sense of homophobia which is just a polite term for prejudice, of expressions of Queer sexuality that use the kind of idiom that RHPS uses, fishnets and corsets and exaggerated makeup and joyful, unhidden sexiness generally.
Don't have a conclusion, really, just reading a lot of the very well deserved praise of the late Tim Curry's oeuvre is rather strongly casting me back to this disturbing moment when I was a kid. I don't think that today's 12yos should be "protected" by even more censorship and keeping them away from any hint of sexuality other than men and women getting married in order to make babies. Rather the opposite, they should have the context to be able to understand transgressive art. And they should feel safe to talk to adults if they do accidentally see something that they're too young to process properly.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-02 10:34 pm (UTC)I understand it’s really important to people. One of my best friends has just been to a showing. My partner used to go etc. but I just. Don’t. Like. It.
Maybe I need to watch it again.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-03 08:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-03 11:10 am (UTC)But had I been younger I could very easily have had the same reactions as you. I wasn't as careful as I could've been when I brought my youngest sister and I know she *did* have some of the same reactions, especially around the culture of "virgin games" that the cast I went to had. The transgression of "pretend to have an orgasm in front of this audience" can feel very different to different people and I still feel bad that I didn't account for the fact that Alys would not be as comfortable being pushed into that one as I had been.
~Sor
*gee mom, is that because it didn't come out when you were any younger? but I digress
(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-03 11:46 am (UTC)Your post got me thinking about queer villains and bury your gays and even the BL manga ("yaoi") that was popular with a certain kind of nerdy girl* when I was a tween/teen and how back then because, hey, at least they weren't evil and didn't die at the end. We were desperate for any queer representation. I wonder if RHPC would hit as hard now? Like if, in some alternate timeline, it first dropped this year but other queer media existed untouched.
*we're not all women now but we were mostly assumed to be girls in the early '00s
(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-03 07:28 pm (UTC)The movie is bad, we all know that, nobody thinks it's a good movie and I don't think many people even think that it succeeds at the parody it's attempting. (Though as I've written elsewhere I think it’s really fascinating that RHPS and Star Wars were made at almost the same time and are both riffing off the same source material of 1930s SFF film, and both have this enduring afterlife.)
You're not wrong to point out the issues with sexual consent and with who is or isn't being mocked by the film. The movie is definitely laughing at the queer people a lot of the time. I kinda think that is part of the joke when fans watch midnight screenings- that dance between sincerity and irony is at the core of camp. There's this sense that this thing that makes fun of us somehow gets at the heart of who we truly are.
So yeah, I'm sorry you didn't watch the film in a safe environment.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-03 08:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-04 04:45 am (UTC)Having read your post, I think that now, that I am older and my opinions, worldview and sexuality (but not, apparently, DW icon ;^)) have changed a lot, I should possibly give it another (i.e. full) try.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-04 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-04 10:56 pm (UTC)RHPS is very much something that a person should be prepared for, preferably with knowledgeable people helping before, during, and after. It's much more Carnival than anything else, and if you don't know that going in, the whole thing doesn't make any sense at all.
I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with it, and I agree fervently that there should have been trusted adults who you could talk to about it, and who would not have used it as further reinforcement of homophobic, sex-negative views.