I Am Divine: ‘the Marlene Dietrich of 70s trash culture’

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/14/i-am-divine-john-waters

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It must be hard to be a renegade these days. Everyone’s so tolerant and unshockable, every taboo’s already been shattered, no one’s impressed any more. What makes I Am Divine so much fun is that it leapfrogs back half a century to a time when long hair was shocking, unwed pregnancy was a scandal, homosexuality was illegal (and almost invisible), smoking reefer turned you communist, and rock’n’roll was a conspiracy to mongrelise and enslave the once-proud white race.

Those were the days! If you wanted to outrage people, it was like: where do I start? It was a task bravely undertaken by Divine and John Waters, the Dietrich and Von Sternberg of 70s trash culture. He was the PT Barnum of the era’s nationwide midnight movie scene; she (or “shim” as Waters called her) was the outrageous, acerbic, up-for-anything-and-I-mean-anything proto-punk missing link between Warhol’s blase, zonked-out Factory drag queens and the in-your-face RuPaul.

Where the acid-drenched, “freaks not hippies” hard outer edge of the counterculture met the gathering wave of post-60s revolutions in gender and sexual identity, there they built their merry little parallel universe of beautiful insane misfits, innocents and oddballs, Egg Ladies, singing assholes and dog shit-gargling 300-pound drag queens. They proudly called themselves “cinematic terrorists” even as the Weather Underground were busy bombing stuff nationwide, and Divine once proudly and loudly claimed responsibility for the still unsolved Manson murders onstage in San Francisco in 1969.

Divine’s sudden death on the brink of success in 1988, and Waters’s subsequent (and gratifying) elevation to quasi-official National Weird Old Uncle Emeritus status have left Divine’s story somewhat in the shadows since. I had forgotten Divine’s career as a raspy singer-rapper who somehow conjoined punk with disco, and provoked disgust on Top Of The Pops with her proudly flexed gut and horrorshow makeup. We see Divine performing with the acid-casualty San Francisco theatre troupe the Cockettes, pushing a shopping cart full of mackerel onstage and pelting the audience with them. Here’s that shy, overweight suburban gay kid with a predilection for dressing up as Vivien Leigh or Liz Taylor, thrown out by his parents on coming out, fully come into his own at last.

My favourite detail comes from his mother Frances. Belatedly suspecting her son Glenn might be this “Divine” she’d seen on gay magazine covers, she rushed to see the first of his movies she could find: Female Trouble, which took a flamethrower to every last one of Frances’s treasured suburban ideals. But she called him right after, they cried, and were fully reconciled until he died. A happy ending to make up for the unhappy one.