New York magazine’s Ariel Levy profiles filmmaker John Waters, who has a Broadway musical forthcoming next month based on his musical Cry-Baby, noting that his interests in art, sex, drugs, class, and transgression have remained intact even though the shock value of his content has slipped away.
Says Waters, when Levy asks him if there’s anything he misses about the past:
“I don’t think my generation is better or had it better. The one thing you’ll never see again—and I’m not so sure it’s bad you missed it—was the sexual revolution. You can’t imagine what it was like to go home and have sex with someone different every day … People really did! In Provincetown there was a bar called Piggies, totally mixed, gay and straight, but it was outside of town and everyone had to walk home and every person would just have sex in the graveyard along the way. I mean, those days will never happen again. Going to places like Hellfire in New York City, you look back and it’s so amazing, and that certainly did lead to terrible things like AIDS—and AIDS ruined everything for the rest of our lives. It ruined people taking chances. That’s over. You missed that.”
Still Waters [new york magazine]
