Yes, It's Problematic: Why Queer People Still Love Rocky Horror

What keeps a movie that flopped in 1975 selling out at midnight fifty years later? 

Us. Queer people did that.

Why Halloween Is Queer

Long before anyone called Halloween "gay Christmas," queer folks called it "bitches' Christmas." For most of the last century  masquerade and cross-dressing laws were used to arrest people for wearing the "wrong" clothes in public. Halloween was the one night a costume let you dress however you wanted. 

In 1930s Chicago,  Black queer communities held huge drag balls every Halloween that could pass as ordinary masquerade parties. As Harvard professor Michael Bronski  puts it, "If you wanted to cross-dress because of your identity, on Halloween you were safe to do it."

How Rocky Horror Became a Queer Cult Film

Richard O'Brien was an out-of-work actor in London when he wrote a play called The Rocky Horror Show, a mashup of B-movie sci-fi, glam rock, and '50s rock 'n' roll. It  opened in a 60-seat upstairs theatre in 1973. It was a hit in London, where it  ran for seven years and won the Evening Standard Award for Best Musical. A sold-out run in Los Angeles convinced 20th Century Fox to make a movie.

Then it hit Broadway in 1975 and closed after a few weeks. According to  Smithsonian Magazine, New York's traditional, middle-class theatregoers were "unimpressed and shocked." The film version premiered in the U.S. on September 26, 1975, and it also FLOPPED.

Then, on April Fools' Day 1976, New York's Waverly Theater started showing it at midnight. Someone shouted a line back at the screen. The room laughed, and a tradition started. Soon, people showed up in costume and acted out scenes under the screen in what became shadow casts, while the callback script kept growing.

Sal Piro, who ran the fan club from 1977 until he died in 2023, was a big part of that. His sister  said he "was always proud of being gay, and helped others feel proud of who they were." Today, Rocky Horror is the longest-running theatrical release in history, and it still plays at midnight in more than 200 U.S. theatres.

Why Queer People Found a Home There

The film flips the usual story. Brad and Janet, the wholesome straight couple, are the scared, out-of-place ones. Frank is the one who appears free.

Editor Margot Atwell, who put together an anthology of queer essays on the film,  said, "Rocky Horror was my first experience with queer joy on a screen." She's far from the only one. For decades, a midnight screening was one of the few public places where fishnets, lipstick, and a corset on any body were normal.

For a lot of trans people, Frank was the first time they saw a little of themselves on screen. Laverne Cox found the film in her first year of college, during a gender-nonconforming time in her life, and  said it gave her "permission to be who I always thought that I was." Some fans took that onto the stage. In Los Angeles, trans performer D. Garret Gafford  played Frank at the Tiffany Theater while saving up for gender-affirming surgery.

The screenings built their own rituals of belonging, too. First-timers are called "virgins," and some casts mark them with a V before welcoming them into the chaos. Music scholar Judith Peraino  compares Brad and Janet's night at the castle to discovering a queer identity. You walk in thinking you know exactly who you are, and you walk out in fishnets.

"Don't dream it, be it" is the whole message of the movie. For a lot of us, it was the first time anyone said that out loud.

Remembering Tim Curry

Tim Curry  died at his home in Los Angeles this August at age 80. He had lived with the effects of a stroke he had in 2012.

He first played Frank-N-Furter on the London stage in 1973, in his twenties, and then played him again in the film. Curry played Frank as seductive and vulnerable, not as a joke. He knew the role might follow him. In a 1975 interview, he  said he "was hesitant in that, if it worked, it might be a difficult image to shake off," but that "it wasn't worth doing unless you took a risk."

He kept his private life private and never asked audiences to read Frank as a reflection of himself. He went on to Annie, Clue, Pennywise in It, and a Tony nomination for Spamalot. Even so, for a lot of us he will always be the one in heels coming down in that elevator. He once said the character  gave "a lot of teenagers permission to be different." I was one of them.

My First Rocky Horror Screening

I first went to Rocky Horror when I was 15 and living in Victoria. I went with my partner at the time, who was the first trans person I had met, but I didn't know that yet. Neither of us was out. We were just lesbians at that time, going to a midnight screening for Halloween.

In a small town, there's only one theatre, maybe 50 seats, but it brought out all of the alternative folks and queers. For a 15-year-old, it was a game changer to see everyone dressed up in kink gear and over-the-top cabaret outfits, and people cross-dressing. It's not that Victoria was incredibly conservative; it's not Alberta. But it's still somewhat of a small town, with very British sensibilities. 

And suddenly I was shown this thriving subculture that I was just starting to dip my toe into as a teenager. Rocky Horror was a place where we could be openly queer together, explore sides of ourselves that we didn't feel safe exploring in our normal lives, and meet other people in the community who would become role models and friends.

I remember wearing fishnets, a black corset, and some sort of tiny little bottom. I was still pretty femmy back then! There were definitely knee-high combat boots, because I wore those every day in high school. I also had a trench coat that zipped up the front, so I could feel at least a little bit safe walking to and from the theatre. 

The straight-up burlesque/goth style felt like an easy entry point, so I didn't try to copy an outfit from the show that first time. Later on, I would go through years of dressing up as Rocky, then Magenta, and then the Laverne Cox version of Frank-N-Furter after the TV version came out. She had such an amazing version of that costume, with the leopard-print red corset and the leather jacket!

What I Saw That Night

There was just so much overt counterculture. It couldn't be put into one box. I didn't even really read it as trans at the time. It was an explosion of creativity and authenticity, and a mix of all of the subcultures I was starting to understand. It was sexy, it was raucous, it was LOUD.

I'd never seen a shadow cast before. I don't even know if I knew that was going to happen! And Frank-N-Furter especially expanded what I understood drag and camp to be. Frank was so over the top that it reframed the gender subversion I had seen up to that point. Things I had considered outlandish, even cross-dressing, felt tame in comparison.

Is Rocky Horror Transphobic?

Parts of it, yes. Let's go through them.

"Sweet Transvestite" (from Transsexual, Transylvania) lumps gender, kink, and alien weirdness into one punchline. Frank gets Brad and Janet into bed by pretending to be someone else, and the film plays that coercion for laughs. He's also a murderer. In the end, the transgender character dies on stage, and the straight couple crawls out of the wreckage. Critics have also pointed to the film's misogyny and its portrayal of disability. If a studio pitched this script today, we'd be the first ones writing the angry blog post.

Then there's O'Brien himself. He identifies as transgender and has called himself "70% male, 30% female." He also said in 2016 that a trans woman "can't be a woman," and in 2020 he  doubled down, saying "you can't ever become a natural woman." Being part of the community doesn't mean someone doesn’t have internalized transphobia. 

Rocky Horror in 1973: The Context

Context doesn't excuse any of this, but it does explain a lot.

O'Brien wrote the show in 1973. England had decriminalized sex between men only six years earlier, and only partly. In the U.S., homosexuality was listed as a mental illness until the American Psychiatric Association removed it in December of that year. Stonewall was four years old. "Transvestite" and "transsexual" were the vocabulary of the day, mostly handed down by doctors and tabloids. Trans people on screen were almost always killers, punchlines, or cautionary tales. (Psycho came out in 1960 and set the template.)

Then a glam-rock musical showed up with a man in a corset and heels who was the most magnetic person in every scene. He didn't apologize or explain himself, and he sang about it. Frank is a villain, sure. He's also the only character in the movie having a good time. Brad and Janet start out uptight and frightened, and by the floor show they're in fishnets. Under all the camp, the movie is telling you that respectability is the thing to fear.

O'Brien was writing from inside his own unnamed questions about gender. He reached for the tools he had, and some of them were crude. That's the tension at the heart of the movie. It's made of the same prejudices it's poking at.

 

Looking Back with Queer and Trans Family

It wasn't until I was a little older and started learning more about queer and trans culture that I understood this movie needed to be viewed through a certain lens. Women's studies in university definitely helped, but so did being around queer and trans family as I got older. We would sometimes do Halloween viewings at someone's house. Afterwards, we would talk about the problematic parts and have friendly debates about whether we felt okay watching our problematic faves.

I've always believed historical pieces like this are really important for archiving and memory-keeping. The cult following Rocky Horror built, and all the events people went to because of it, can't be taken lightly. It was a whole movement. When you watch it, you're connecting to the culture and history that came before you.

And when you think about the trans people who were out when Rocky Horror was made, some of the language it used would have been common. We don't police how people self-identify, even if we now find a term outdated or offensive. (As Laverne Cox  put it while filming the 2016 remake, Frank is a transvestite "in very historically specific ways," and that's not a word to use for trans people today.) So you can still see it as an important piece of our history, and something that brought so many of us together to fully be ourselves and experience so much joy and celebration.

How to Love a Problematic Fave

We all have problematic faves. You don't have to choose between pretending a thing is flawless and throwing it out entirely. You can hold both.

Holding both means saying the coercion scenes are coercion. It means teaching new fans why "transvestite" and "transsexual" aren't words to use about real people, and noticing what it means that the queer character dies so the straight couple can go home. It also means admitting this movie got a lot of us through.

Plenty of people were safest at a midnight screening. Some of them were trans before they had the word for it. Some were kids who'd never seen a body as theirs treated as beautiful, and some were newly exploring folks who got dressed up for the first time in a dark theatre full of strangers who cheered. They weren't fans because they missed the flaws. Nothing else was offering them anything close.

The audience has been fixing this movie for fifty years. Shadow casts put trans and non-binary performers in Frank's heels, and the callback script changes as people do. Some casts now start the night with a  content warning or a quick talk about consent before the lights go down. The culture around Rocky Horror grew up faster than the text did. That's what happens when a community claims something. We took a flawed movie and made it ours.

So watch it. Sing along, and call out the bad parts too. Don't dream it. Be it.

Thanks for Being Here

To everyone who has ever pulled on fishnets in a dark theatre, yelled at a screen, or walked home in a long coat with your heart pounding: thank you. You made these spaces safe enough for the next kid to show up. That's the whole reason we do what we do, and this Halloween, we're thinking of every one of you.