Pink Flamingos: A Queer Beginner’s Guide to Family, Style and Not Giving a Sh*t
John Waters unleashed his magnum-opus of filth, Pink Flamingos, onto the world in 1972, bringing Divine, The Dreamlanders, and coprophagia into the wider public consciousness for the first time. Almost 50 years later it’s still the most important moment in our queer cultural history.
When I first saw Pink Flamingos at 15 years old, it was as if someone smashed a hole in the back of my head and poured a fluorescent pink slime into my brain. I had seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show by this point, and Frank-N-Furter’s gyrating hips and axe-wielding psychopathy had gone some way to shining a light on a very different way of life — a life of glamour, rebellion, a life of ‘don’t dream it, be it’. But if Rocky Horror had ushered me to the door of queerness, Pink Flamingos knocked the door down and threw me in head first. The plot is simple — Divine and her chosen family of outlaws live in a trailer on the outskirts of Baltimore, peacefully revelling in their reputations as the ‘filthiest people alive’. When a local couple, Connie and Raymond Marble, attempt to challenge their title, it spirals into an ever escalating turf-war fought on the grounds of cannibalism, incest and excrement. To this day, because of this film, drag to me is not gowns and Beyonce medleys, but chicken-fucking and dog-shit eating (though in fairness I’m vegan, so I can’t do either). On initial viewing Pink Flamingos is overwhelming, and truly many, many people hate it. The acting is diabolical (except for Divine). The look of the whole thing betrays its shoestring budget (of $10,000, a loan from Waters’ father — who was later asked not to come and see the film he had paid for). Certainly, I can imagine many queer people hate it too, and resent its position as one of the key moments in our cultural history. We spent so long fighting for acceptance, to be included, to be respected — why would we want to claim ownership of this film? A film in which a drag queen shows her son affection by giving him a blowjob? A film where a heterosexual couple kidnap women, forcibly impregnate them, then sell their babies to lesbians on the black market to fund their inner-city school drugs ring? All of the above is why I think it’s the most important piece of queer art ever made.
Pink Flamingos is crass and camp in equal measure, but beneath the garish pink 1950’s pastiche and kinky sex bubbles a beast of pure anger. Pink Flamingos arrived on a similar cultural wave to exploitation horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left — in fact, if one ever struggles to describe Pink Flamingos, ‘the bastard child of Chainsaw Massacre and Rocky Horror’ may give people some idea. Water’s gang of freaks and outsiders (known as the Dreamlanders) were part of the late 60’s/early 70’s cultural comedown, when the free-loving hippy dream dissipated into the Charles Manson/Vietnam/Watergate nightmare. It’s a suburban apocalypse committed to 16mm film, every social and sexual taboo imaginable reeled off in an ever spiralling descent into mayhem. This is certainly what the film is most known for, and remains its most enduring legacy for queer and non-queer fans alike. Yes, Divine did really eat dog shit on camera. Yes, two people fuck with a chicken in-between them until it dies. Yes, a man lip syncs Surfin Bird with his prolapsed rectum. Think I’m being crude? This is Pink Flamingos, after all — that’s kind of the entire point. No film before or since has struck such a perfect balance between true punk attitude and camp sensibility, and therefore proved that flipping the table is an intrinsic part of queer art.
This is certainly what first attracted me to Pink Flamingos. When I first saw Pink Flamingos (circa 2011), offensive humour was the order of the day. The silly, shallow kind, the Family Guy kind. Jokes about 9/11, concentration camps, slavery, AIDS and rape culture were the bread and butter of many secondary a school boy’s ‘banter’. It was embarrassing then, and it’s even more embarrassing now. For this all to coincide with emo and scene culture, as well as the age when everyone was discovering internet porn and 4Chan for the first time was really very unfortunate indeed. It was a toxic combination that hopefully didn’t result in too many toxic people.
I tried extremely hard to carve out a niche in that social landscape. I subjected myself to entire Enter Shikari albums. I feigned interest in death metal and ‘screamo’. When I couldn’t convince anyone of that, I turned to making the same sort of jokes everyone else was making — God, the things that came out of my mouth. But all my efforts were doomed to fail, because nobody believed I could be into such things anyway — can we guess why? ‘You’ve never seen this? You like them? Aren’t you gay?’ Gay people didn’t like stuff that was edgy, or different, or ‘dark’. Gay people liked musicals, and Mean Girls, and Glee (my unabashed Lady Gaga obsession probably didn’t help my cause). I can see with hindsight now that my snobbishness was a result of teenage angst, and that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking these things — that people can be multifaceted (I can now proudly list Madonna’s entire discography, though liking Glee is a step too far even for me). Dark, edgy, taboo art was associated with masculinity — only boys got to decide what was edgy, and only boys were allowed to engage with it. Being a boy meant punching down. And I was certainly not enough of a boy. Trying to understand that dichotomy — that jokes about killing gay people, jokes about AID’s and gay suicide, and the very real homophobic abuse I suffered at school, were fair-game. Yet I as a gay person was afforded no ownership over any of it, because it’s only funny if it doesn’t happen to you. Minorities are always the butt of the joke, never the joker.
It wasn’t until I saw Pink Flamingos that my whole perception was turned upside down. Here was something that was beyond crass, beyond irreverent, miles beyond the limits of acceptable or good taste — but more importantly, it was so fucking GAY! You could tell a mile off — the wittiest dialogue (“Well I guess there are just two kinds of people, Miss. Sandstone: my kind of people, and assholes”), the most ridiculous sex acts, the trailer-park glamour of it all — I knew this couldn’t have come out the brain of a straight man. I became obsessed with John Waters, devouring every film, interview and press release he graced with his presence. And of course, I became even more obsessed with Divine — the ridiculous makeup, the enormous figure squeezed into that gorgeous fishtail gown, the sheer poetry of her most infamous line: ‘Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate Cannibalism! Eat SHIT! Filth are my politics, filth is my life!’. In Divine I saw what I wanted to be — someone queer, someone gorgeous, someone proudly freakish and defiantly different. I doodled her eye makeup in every lesson I hated at school, until I had filled entire pages in my notebooks. I bought all her albums, despite their varying levels of quality. And in 2017, I got her tattooed on my arm. I’m not just being facetious when I say that the moment Divine smiled into the camera with dog shit smeared across her teeth (a shit-eating smile, if there ever was one) was truly the first moment I could say I was proud to be gay. It revealed a whole other world to me — a world that was miles beyond the comprehension of my straight peers, in both shock-factor and style. It showed me that there were people out there like me. Waters expanded upon this in his later films, as he returned all the bile queer people had suffered in riotously funny spades. The best of all must be Aunt Ida’s (Edith Massey) line from his following (and arguably superior) film Female Trouble, delivered to her nephew Gater: “I’m afraid you’re gunna work in an office…have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries. The world of heterosexual is a sick and boring life!” Water’s may have perfected his craft on his following films, but Pink Flamingos remains unmatched in its pure joyous anarchy, wittier and more purposeful than many of even its biggest fans like to give it credit.
As I grew older, and I settled into my queerness and into my gender expression, you’d have thought maybe that Pink Flamingos would have lost some of its power. That I’d look back on it the way some people look back on punk — great music, shame about the swastikas. But if anything my adoration has grown exponentially over the years. You see, beneath the camp, and even beneath the anger (who knew this film had so many layers) there’s a beating heart — one of love. Pink Flamingos is gross, punk and violent, but beneath it all there’s an underlying glimmer of hope — when the world pushes you out, there is a family out there waiting. Divine’s brood is perfectly dysfunctional — a chosen family, with a proud and loyal matriarch, who are fiercely protective of each other and genuinely happy to be together. They live their happily perverted lives, peacefully and respectfully, pushed only to acts of violence when their title is challenged, or when their mobile home and all their meagre belongings are burned down by the vile Connie and Raymond Marble. At a time in Western civilisation when the family unit was crumbling, Pink Flamingos showed the world an alternative — a true chosen family, one that is respectful of everyone’s differences and unified in their love for another. This is the message of Pink Flamingos that I carry with me today.
And I think that’s why through so many shifts in the cultural and political landscape — from the beginnings of queer liberation, to the AID’s crisis, to the centrist politics of the 90’s queer movement and into our modern day era of Rupaul’s Drag Race — Pink Flamingos has a endured like a bad smell, for those who both love it and hate it. Many people, queer or not, will hate Pink Flamingos because it is not normalising, or polite, or respectable. And who’d want to be respectable — at least, in the way we’re told we’re supposed to be respectable? Certainly, Divine and her family have an awful lot of respect for each other. They respect each other’s kinks. They respect each other’s gender fluidity. They respect each other’s feelings of inadequacy and grief. They are in many ways the queer ideal — passionately individual, yet fiercely familial. If I could give every young queer person one thing — film, book, album, whatever — as a guide I’d give them Pink Flamingos in a heartbeat. They may hate it. It may change their life. But at least they’ll know that however they choose to live their lives, there will be people out there waiting for them — queer and not, freaky and crazy, glamorous and grimy. That the people around them now may not get it, and that they may never get it, and that’s okay. You don’t want to have to deal with that anyway. After all, there are two kinds of people in this world — our kind of people, and assholes.
