Poo Is Still Political, And 5 More Nuggets Of Advice From John Waters
"I'm PC. That might give you pause, but I am," says the 73 year old Pope of trash.
Early into John Waters’ 90-minute Make Trouble show at the Sydney Opera House — a delightful mix of stand-up comedy, career retrospective and life coaching — he sets out the night’s agenda: we’re working towards “a new kind of ghastly”.
John Waters knows ghastly: he hasn’t made a career off generating pearl-clutching so much as snatching the whole necklace and letting them scatter on the ground.
Fifty years since their release, his biggest films — Female Trouble, Pink Flamingos — continue to make conservatives trip over their filthy irreverence Showgirls-style. While he hasn’t directed a film since 2004, his many books, live shows and festivals continue to inspire queerdoes across the globe, including his latest book, Mr. Know It All.
If you missed out on Make Trouble, here are six pieces of advice Waters had, from navigating PC culture with irreverence, accepting your flaws and amending one of his most famous quotes.
#1. PC Culture Is Ridiculous (But Important)
We were a little worried when Waters referenced how college audiences require ‘trigger warnings’ early into the night, but despite the continual references to ‘PC culture’, he never teetered into Jerry Seinfeld or Dave Chappelle territory.
Yes, Waters referenced ‘not being able to get away’ with sleeping with your colleagues and questioned how difficult it is to be a delinquent in 2019, but his millennial bashing always came from a place of warmth. The harsh reality of PC culture is that parts of it are ridiculous — we often lose our points in semantics, or celebrate war criminals for being feminist icons — and Waters reminds us it’s okay to laugh at it.
The difference was that Waters, impressively, always punched up. There was always an empathy to his jokes, whether about college campus politics, people with emotional support animals, or autosexuals claiming to be the final letter of the LGBTIQA+ acronym. It was unlike anything we’d seen before in stand-up at this level: a nuanced position built up over decades as one of the queer community’s leaders, and a sign that a 73-year-old can listen to today’s emerging voices and opinions.
When Waters said, “I’m PC. That might give you pause, but I am”, he fought against the connotations and limitations of the term, where conservatives have turned caring about people into a dismissive punchline.
Of course, he isn’t perfect (a tangent about how Johnny Depp was “always a gentleman” during filming of Cry-Baby was unnecessary, to say the least) but Make Trouble, without directly saying it, demanded a more nuanced way of navigating the world, one where one comment doesn’t invalidate all others.
#2. ‘You Have To Own The Joke’ (And TERFS Must Fuck Off)
Where many older queer men struggle with anything that doesn’t centre themselves, Waters repeatedly noted that the trans community were the new target of conservatives and need the wider community’s support.
At one point, Waters went off about TERFS — trans exclusionary radical feminists, who believe trans women are not ‘real women’ and grew up ‘privileged’ as they were assigned male. But, of course, he did this in a distinctly trashy way, imagining Big Freedia running into a gender-neutral bathroom to piss on a Republican voter’s child.
“I’m PC. That might give you pause, but I am.”
Waters also was ready to acknowledge that many of his films haven’t aged well in regard to trans issues, specifically referencing Desperate Living, but stood by a scene in Pink Flamingos where actress Elizabeth Williams flashes a male pervert by revealing her breasts and penis.
According to Waters, the scene was important to Williams, a trans woman, as it meant she was making the joke before anyone else could. Waters repeatedly mentioned “owning the joke” as a powerful move forward.
#3. ‘Being Gay Isn’t Enough’, Or What Makes A Rebel In 2019?
In one part, Waters asks what a juvenile delinquent looks like now, saying it’s a far cry from smoking behind the bleachers. He lands on hackers ‘shutting down the government’ and the likes of Greta Thunberg, who he calls the one person that angers conservatives as much as trans people.
In short, he jokes that it’s not enough to just ‘be gay’ to be a rebel against society: “it’s a good start”, he says, but to actually stand on the fringes, you have to do more than smoke cigarettes and suck dick. In an era where LGBTIQ identity and anti-establishment aesthetics have been co-opted by capitalism, we need to do more to make a stand.
#4. Poo Is Still Political
Throughout Make Trouble, Waters keeps coming back to scatology. More than half a decade later, Divine eating dog poo in Pink Flamingos remains a steaming hot talking point, even though it wasn’t really that weird for his freakish friends.
He calls Flamingos a “film of limits”, and makes a big deal about of pushing what’s deemed acceptable and what’s not — today, that war is less about what eating shit than how you present and showing up in hostile spaces. In Waters’ world, eating shit is the same as being ‘unapologetically you’.
Still, he says there’s power in the Trojan Horse approach, noting how “even racists like Hairspray“, and that Divine’s presence in the mainstream remains a beacon of weirdness and gender-subversion — even if that was never her intent. “Divine wasn’t trans. He didn’t want to be a woman,” he notes. “He wanted to be a monster.” The latter’s still important, too.
#5. Fail Upwards
Waters has made a living off irreverence, and recommends “failing upwards” and how he owes his early career to drug-fuelled brainstorms. While he doesn’t suggest we all do the same, it’s a reminder to not take our lives so seriously.
Talking about Polyester‘s infamous smell-o-vision, he says, “All over the world people gave me money to smell a fart”. We should be so lucky.
#6. If You Go Home With Someone…
At the end of the night, audience members stood behind mics and yelled out questions from the crowd. We ended on an important one: a fact-check as to whether Waters ever said his oft-attributed quote, “if you go home with someone and they don’t own books, don’t fuck them”.
He did, for reference, but wanted to give an update: “If you go home with someone and they have books in their bathroom, don’t fuck them”. Some things remain too gross.
John Waters’ latest book Mr. Know It All is out now. Photo by Prudence Upton. His Australian tour continues in Melbourne on Friday 18 October at Hamer Hall, and Saturday 19 October at MONA in Hobart.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. He is on Twitter.