50 Years of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

First released in 1973, the Rocky Horror Picture Show is infamous in queer circles, and has been for half a century now. It's hard to find a Boomer or Gen Xer in the kink or queer communities who hasn't seen this movie, and even a large number of Millennials have embraced it. Many theaters have regular performances of Rocky Horror with audience participation. It is very much a cult classic.

On the other hand, a lot of people have said a lot of things about the Problematic aspects of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. So, so many people. You get the feeling that none of these critics understand why anyone ever liked the movie in the first place. So here's why Rocky Horror matters, why it's so...that way, and why you cannot separate a film from its surrounding culture.

The first thing you need to know to understand Rocky Horror is that it was made in the early 1970s. Being gay or trans was, itself, a crime in nearly all of the US. LGBT+ representation of any kind was thin on the ground and always, always negative. We were Disney villains (and when you look at Disney's animated classics, the number of effeminate men or man-hating women cast as villains is staggering). We were believed, one and all, to be pedophiles and predators. People hated us with a level of disgust that today's LGBT+ youth cannot imagine. And this is how the average American viewed us in the 1970s.

Trying to be respectable was not working at all, either. The "gay panic" defense, in which men could get away with murdering queer folks by claiming their victims were flirting with them, had not been challenged yet in any court. (And it's still accepted by most states today, kiddos, so you are not as safe as you think.)

It is against this backdrop that we see the squeaky-clean WASP couple Brad and Janet, a couple who knocks on the door of a creepy-looking castle hoping to use their phone to call a mechanic when their car breaks down. Frank N. Furter greets them, and you probably know the rest of the plot.

So let's break things down one step at a time here, starting with Frank himself. A self-described "sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania," Frank is the depraved queer person that you warn your kids about. And audiences loved it. Why?

Because respectability politics was not working. To this day, homophobes view Pete Buttigieg exactly the same way as they view the raunchiest leather daddies at Pride. So why not embrace one's inner freak? (Tim Curry certainly did. You can't argue at any point of this movie that he wasn't having fun with the role.) More importantly, modern critiques of Frank's character often ignore the fact that in the 1970s, the boundary between gay men, trans people, and cross-dressers was extremely fluid, and remains so to a lesser extent today. Plus, "transvestite" and "transsexual" were the preferred terms by the trans community at the time, so you can't really argue that the film is being transphobic by using words that the trans community at that time preferred. It's like calling the UNCF racist because of what the N stands for.

Does this excuse Frank's actions in the movie? No. But the movie is supposed to be a horror-movie spoof in the first place. Horror villains, by definition, do bad things. That is arguably the point.

So Frank rapes both Brad and Janet, and infects them with The Gay. This is not at all subtle, and plays off of a real fear that homophobes still have. "I wanna feel dirty," Janet sings to Rocky. Brad apparently has no problem with wearing makeup and fishnets later in the film. This was the essence of the gay panic: that gay people could turn you gay just by coming on to you. Note that the Christianity Today article describes Brad and Janet as "embracing perversion." RHPS seems to be saying, "Is this really all that scary? People in tights and makeup bother you that much? Are you that weak, society?"

Importantly, while Brad, Janet, and the Professor are left stranded at the end of the movie, they aren't injured in any way and can, presumably, still go for help. (The Professor might have a harder time with his wheelchair damaged, but only one of them actually needs to summon the police in any case.) The aliens took the castle and its denizens away to be punished. Overall, things don't go as badly as they could have, given that we know that Rocky has killed people before. (Don't get me wrong, things are still really, really bad. But they could have been worse.)

Rocky Horror is a way for queer folks to revel in what makes us different. It's not gay as in happy. It's queer as in fuck you. And in 2023, we could all use a little "fuck you" towards an establishment that makes us all out to be Franks.