Losing it: Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show

 Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien, Charles Gray. Dir. Jim Sharman, Fox, 1975

I want to tell you about the night I lost my virginity. Appropriately, it happened at midnight on a Saturday in a darkened room. I was about two months shy of my 16th birthday. Unlike many deflowerings, that room was packed with people, many of them men wearing women's lingerie and makeup, the rest dressed in their '80s finery: denim, leather, pleather, parachute pants, skinny ties. Most of them under the influence of something.

A man in lingerie and wig demanded of the room it offer up its virgins for auction. We were herded into a central aisle as half-sober hipsters yelled out bawdy and downright obscene bids.

"Sid Vicious's shit!" "Betty Ford's mastectomy-scar collection!" "Betty Ford's other teat!"

I don't recall what the winning bid was for me. I was introduced to my new owner, a small Asian American woman, who smiled and shoved me back into my row with my friends. A moment later, the room went black, the huge movie screen illuminated, a massive pair of painted-red lips appearing from the darkness as an androgynous voice began to croon.

"Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still/and he told us/where to stand..."

If you've never attended a screening of Jim Sharman's 1975 horror musical comedy, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, you may not know that those seeing it for the first time are offered for auction as "virgins" before every showing. The analogy has some validity, in my experience. All the books/movies/TV shows of my youth made losing one's sexual virginity a near-mystical experience, the aftermath of which involved a lot of sitting around, remembering, staring soulfully into the middle distance, trying to feel some sort of qualitative difference from before, wondering when it will happen again. The days after I first saw ROCKY HORROR found me sitting in class at school, remembering the movie, thinking about each scene, wondering what the hell I just experienced and, more importantly, when I would experience it again.

A few days ago, posting on Facebook, I characterized ROCKY HORROR as "arguably one of the worst films of the '70s." I picked up the dvd sometime last year for a couple bucks and have watched it without the pageantry and audience participation three times so far, including last Saturday as the third leg of a Friday Night Frights triple feature (STARRY EYES and THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE were the first two.) No more than 15 minutes in, I realized I'm not qualified to make pronouncements on RHPS's quality as a movie for one simple reason. I've seen it too often and love it far too much to ever be objective.

When I bought the dvd I had not seen the film since 1989. Between 1983 and '89, however, I went to the Skywalk Cinema in downtown Cincinnati for midnight showings as often as I could, willingly risking being grounded for staying out past curfew. I found a bootleg vinyl record of the movie in a used record store near the University of Cincinnati my junior year and listened to it until I knew every line of dialogue by heart. I auditioned for my high school's spring musical, BARNUM, by singing "I'm Going Home" and doing Frank's monologue explaining his creation of "the monster."

Even 32 years later, I know every line of dialogue, every word to all the songs. Watching it Saturday morning I found myself singing along to every song, mouthing the dialogue about a half-second before the characters onscreen. Laughing. Giggling. Howling. Not with derision or ironic mirth but with joyous abandon.

If you somehow don't know the plot of ROCKY HORROR, you're in the wrong place. Wikipedia and a few thousand other sites can take care of that. A loving homage to and sendup of American and British horror and scifi films from the 1930s to the early '60s, virtually every "flaw" in the picture is deliberate. Screenwriter Richard O'Brien, adapting from his British stage play, knows his horror tropes - the stilted dialogue, the strange gaps between lines, the over-the-top melodrama, and the way those films have always spoken and given solace to outsiders who feel alienated from mainstream, conformist, and heteronormative US/UK culture.

Which, as many others have observed before me, explains ROCKY HORROR's enduring appeal, particularly to teenagers and 20somethings. ROCKY served as my generation's introduction to queer culture, a couple decades before that term gained traction. More specifically, it served as my introduction.

Like many/most teenagers, I went through some years of gender confusion. Do I like girls? Do I like boys? Do I like boys who dress like girls? Who am I? Why do I feel this way? Yesterday I got off on a Penthouse smuggled into the house, so why is this guy on the swim team with me so irresistable today?

RHPS did not answer my questions. It did something more important. It told me the answers didn't matter, that I was among friends and kindred spirits just for asking. ROCKY gave me delight and joy and entertainment, but it also gave me cameraderie, identification, a sense of belonging and being ok as I was. It gave me comfort.

As it does to succeeding generations. Watching the other morning, I wondered whether the film still connects with a more woke audience, if certain scenes my peers and I took for granted were now considered rapey or otherwise inappropriate. I do not know the answer, but I am informed by friends with kids in their teens and 20s that it still plays at midnight in Cincinnati at the Esquire, my neighborhood movie house back in the '70s and '80s. It continues to find and enjoy a following, which makes me think it must continue to give kids what it gave me. Permission to be ok with my own freakiness. Reassurance my sexuality did not define my worth as a person.

Heck, it continues to connect with me and I'll be 54 this year. Granted, much of that connection now relates to my love of Old Hollywood and of England's Hammer Studios. Over the last year I've purchased the Universal Horror box set, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, and George Pal's WAR OF THE WORLDS, which enriches my appreciation of the film's references and sight-gags. Still, I am a man who identifies as bisexual, or at least occasionally turned on by a good looking guy, and the virginity I lost in that theatre 38 years ago remains the only virginity I've ever lost ("You mean he's -?" "Mm-hmm") so it continues to work on that level, too.

I am going to tell you, now, that ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is one of the most significant films to emerge from the 1970s. Its normalizing of queer culture and reassurance of confused kids like me may not be unique to that decade - John Waters was doing much the same in his movies - but is both exceptional and indispensible. Throw in the audience-participation, the shadow casts, the cosplay, and it's kind of like going to a Dead show in the '80s - one of the last ways American kids can have adventures of their own. It is not an experience to miss, but it is also a film one can enjoy on its own terms, away from the maddened crowd.

Ultimately, it doesn't much matter whether ROCKY HORROR is a good or bad movie. In many ways it's not even a proper movie. It's a rite of passage, an adventure. An experience. One everybody has to have for themselves, which is another reason why I'm not reviewing it in any traditional sense. It lies beyond mere critical opinion. It is that phrase music critics love, sui generis, a thing unlike any other.

Which is how most of us feel in our adolescence, I think. ROCKY HORROR gives catharsis to those fears and doubts and disquieting questions. How many movies can claim that?