![]() ![]() ‘I would kill myself if I was gay,’ a friend once told me on an otherwise forgotten summer night. And when it was, it would only be as the butt of some grotesquely laddish joke from some grotesquely laddish peer. I grew up in a rural northern village where life seems forever paralysed in a 1970s Middle England Only Fools and Horses-induced fever dream and where every pothole-ridden road leads back to the same sandstone church, named for Saint Bartholomew. My feelings are unsurprising in retrospect. In that room I began to feel filth, and in that room I began to process what that meant. And so I would sit cross-legged and alone in my bed, praying to a God in whom I didn’t quite believe and scratching, hoping that these rituals would make me clean. Thoughts that led me to my flesh, to the red constellations that would appear there too as I itched at my skin in petty self-flagellation, hoping to scour off the dirt that I could almost feel manifesting as I careened towards an inevitable conclusion: something was wrong with me. Staring into their glow on such nights where time seemed to turn stagnant, thoughts would unfurl in my head in frenzied chain reaction, thoughts that always led me back to myself. I looked at them with curiosity they contemplated me back. They clustered in the sky like an abstract constellation, one whose meaning I could never quite understand. At night, I would stay up just to watch the world through my bedside window, staring into the dark still of a Lancashire countryside whose monolithic twilight was blemished only by the hypnotic red lights of the radio tower on Winter Hill. Even now, I can build that room in my head, four walls in irradiant eggshell and a little guitar that sat ever hopeful in the corner. I will always associate my queerness with my childhood bedroom at my grandmother’s house. “It is a film that chronicles with camp and crash violence its queer reclamation” It is a film that preaches as doctrine a feeling with which I have long toiled - a feeling of filth - and chronicles with camp and crash violence its queer reclamation. But it is also a film in which I find an esoteric beauty, a beauty so disgustingly and uniquely and undeniably queer. ![]() Truth be told, I’ve only done so once and promptly vowed never to again. The film itself is borderline unwatchable. It’s the leitmotif of his cult classic Pink Flamingos, a self-baptised ‘exercise in bad taste’ that unfolds as an orgy of depravity in which every taboo, from castration to rape to bestiality to murder, is transgressed for the camera in lucid detail as Divine vies for the title of ‘filthiest person alive’. ‘Filth is my politics, filth is my life.’ With that simple declaration, Divine - the monstrous drag queen in whom American director John Waters found his muse - pledges her allegiance to a peculiar thing: filth. Content Note: This article contains discussion of self-harm and homophobia
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