When I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I was 12. I loved it because it showed me how even the most prim and proper people need to be decadent every now and then. It also taught me to be intelligent about my excesses, because someday my minion might just turn on me and shoot me with a beam of pure anti-matter if I went overboard. Rocky Horror was also my introduction to non-binary gender and sexuality, and I was thrilled to know I wasn't just some sort of freak for feeling differently than my peers.
When I was finally able to go to a midnight showing some years later, I was delighted to see that the culture in the theater challeneged the hetero- and socionormative even more. We were encouraged to get involved; dance and sing and yell at the screen and each other instead of being forced to sit quietly and watch, like we had been told to do for the better part of our lives to that point. Queers and genderqueers, social misfits, geeks, goths, punks, and all sorts of rejects from the mainstream, all came together to revel in Frankenfurter's deviance. Community grew, and was strengthened by our love of the strange and unusual, but also out of our combined need to escape from the world that told us that boys couldn't wear makeup; that girls were supposed to hate sex; that hetero relationships were the only ones that mattered.
I met a lot of amazing people in that theater. The shadowcast was full of crazy, creative people, pushing the boundaries of their prescribed roles. When I first saw Riff Raff blow plumes of fire across the stage my heart near exploded with joy. The callback 'Queens' were pressed to come up with more creative witticisms and cultural updates to old callbacks during the show; I felt honored to be one of them. I met writers and filmmakers and painters and spoken word artists and singers and nihilists and hippies and satanists and dykes and nerds and goths and punks and transvestites and people who couldn't even fit into any of those labels, and they were family, and I loved them.
I remember coming out of the theater one night to find a boy being beaten up by some drunken rednecks from the bar across the street; as my friends and I charged forward shouting, the drunks took off, only to be chased down the street by about twenty or so fellow theatergoers. They caught one of them and bodily hauled him to the police cars that always seemed to park on the other side of the theater while the rest of us checked the boy's wounds and, upon learning he was semi-homeless after being outed, arranged a safe haven and transport.
A friend of friends had been having a rough time with her family accepting her as a lesbian, and, upon discovering she was stuck at home one Saturday evening with no transportation, my friends and I insisted we go and collect her. Later that night, she broke down outside of the Denny's; she had been about to kill herself when I had called. We stayed up all night talking, and she stayed at my place for a few days until she was able to take care of herself. Rocky Horror really did save her life.
One very insane time, my best friend's car was put out of commission by an accident. We needed a way to get to Rocky, so I spent my tax return on a beat up Ford LTD station wagon with broken power steering. We didn't have time to get it properly registered and inspected, so once it was fixed up enough to run we used the tags from my friend's car to get her on the street, and promptly drove about 200 miles in 24 hours; in order to collect the usual suspects and attend the show. The station wagon was destroyed less than three days later in another accident, but it had served its purpose.
I remember hours spent at diners, ruminating on everything from the nature of the universe and the existence of Gods, to how sad it was that some of our dearest friends were living in hell because of who they were and how we could fix that, to the real reasons the Transylvanians came to Earth in the first place. We would flood in with our weirdness and the rest of the world was held at bay for a little while longer. We would smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and leave the diner to drive to the beach, to watch the sunrise.
Eventually the night would end, and the masses would scatter, departing for whatever mundane hell we had to live through in order to survive long enough to make it to the next weekend.
When the theater finally closed, a lot of us cried. One of the callback Queens purchased a little, second-run theater not long after, expressly for the purpose of showing Rocky. I would drive down as often as I could, which was considerably less than before, but every time I arrived I was greeted with multitudes of love. And occasionally a request to fill-in for one of their shadowcast. Later, I would perform with a shadowcast in Philadelphia, and even more infrequently drive down to Delaware, where yet more of my extended Rocky family was performing in another shadowcast. My world was growing wider by the day, and Rocky family became Gamer family became Drag Family Theater Family became Artist Family became Faerie Family... and they all blended and merged until I didn't know one from the other, and my world was suddenly full of wonderful, intelligent, creative, strange people I didn't know existed until I watched one strange little movie.
Tonight was the first night of the last weekend of this incarnation of The Rocky Horror Show. After the performance tonight, I talked with a number of audience members, including a rainbow-clad, pierced and tattooed teenager who had stumbled upon our show when the concert she and her friends had come to town to see had been postponed. "Of course we have to go see Rocky," she had said. "It's the only place we know we can belong."
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