@indi @vahnj fuck, Rocky was EVERYTHING to some people back in the eighties. There was a whole subculture around it, whose edges blurred out into other parts of nerd and queer cultures. Friendships and romances started there. Kids from the middle of nowhere felt their first rumblings of being Not Straight as they watched the journey of Brad and Janet through the tattered goth excesses of the Transylvanians from the Transsexual Galaxy.

It was not MY everything. I only saw it a few times with some of my friends. None of us were deep in that scene. But it was, quite definitely, A Scene.

And yeah, it’s problematic as fuck now. Both the film and the body of responses built up around it, the litanies spoken to hundreds of screens across the nation by thousands and thousands of kids in tattered fishnets and finery. But it was a major light of Queerness and Weirdness. Maybe even a last lingering connection to the gay culture that AIDS destroyed, leaving a generation of queer kids to grow up with no queer elders to guide them.

Queer culture eats itself now. The modes and terms change constantly, and it feels like any expression of queerness older than five or so years is suspect, full of Bad Slurs that used to be our own words. We can never celebrate the old shared rituals like the Time Warp again. Do we gain something by losing these old, campy, theatrical rituals and becoming nearly indistinguishable from the straights?

I mean, I’m no Theatre Queer either. If we’ve lost something I’ve lost it along with everyone else except the old-school drag queens.