Act Bad!
A master class on how to harness humor and horniness to start a revolution
The inimitable John Waters. (Moviestore Collection Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo)
I’m a Yippie at heart, a smart-ass late-1960s fake revolutionary who even today thinks riots are a good place to get lucky for sex. A refried radical who still knows how to throw the tear gas back at the police yet is never in the front lines of a standoff where you can get squirted with fire hoses or beaten with nightsticks. I guess even then I understood that the “revolution” wasn’t really going to happen, but the anarchy surrounding the idea at the time was certainly exciting. I’m white, so I never got a “rough ride” in a paddy wagon. The few times I was arrested I was always released from lockup on my own recognizance, not on bail like a poor person. I’m a brat, even at 72, and still look forward to political trouble. Civil disobedience is better than Botox any day.
God, I miss the Yippies—those “Groucho Marxists,” as they were referred to by ABC News. Angry left-wing hippies who were tired of giving peace a chance and instead staged hilariously disrespectful political stunts such as throwing fake money to the crowds at the New York Stock Exchange and watching the people scramble to pick it up. Or threatening to put LSD in Chicago’s water supply. “Levitating” the Pentagon with mind control during a demonstration to spook Republicans. I think I actually pissed on the Justice Department building in D.C. with a bunch of Yippies during a demonstration. You should have seen the horrified face of Attorney General John Mitchell as he watched the “piss-in” from his office window.
The Yippie leaders wrote devilish little how-to books that corrupted further the hippie ideals of the times. Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman became the first best-seller that had to be kept off the shelves and under the counter for a whole new set of obvious reasons. Abbie Hoffman was my spiritual leader—a media manipulator who used humor as a weapon against his enemy. Even Andrew Breitbart, the late right-wing activist, admitted to me when we did Bill Maher’s show together that Abbie had been a big influence on him—he just used the same tactics for the other side.
The Yippie leaders wrote devilish little how-to books that corrupted further the hippie ideals of the times. Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman became the first best-seller that had to be kept off the shelves and under the counter for a whole new set of obvious reasons. Abbie Hoffman was my spiritual leader—a media manipulator who used humor as a weapon against his enemy. Even Andrew Breitbart, the late right-wing activist, admitted to me when we did Bill Maher’s show together that Abbie had been a big influence on him—he just used the same tactics for the other side.
Fags and dykes together were a definite new wing of defiance.
Paul Krassner was our “Citizen Kane.” Not only did he come up with the actual word yippie, he wrote and edited the most radical humor magazine of my lifetime, The Realist. Its outrageous cover story in May 1967, “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” was so timely and rude that some media outlets actually believed he had the goods on what got censored in William Manchester’s book on the Kennedy assassination. Krassner’s comic theory that LBJ supposedly penetrated the bullet hole in the throat of Kennedy’s corpse with his penis must have been the catalyst that inspired me to shoot the entire Kennedy assassination scene with Divine playing Jackie and climbing over the trunk of the limo in that bloodied Chanel suit and pillbox hat just three months later for my film Eat Your Makeup.
The Berkeley Barb was another useful radical publication—a weekly paper devoted to personal sex ads (thought to be very progressive at the time) and how-to advice about ripping off the establishment. Hidden in their classifieds were the actual AT&T codes, which changed annually, enabling you to invent phony working credit card numbers to make free long-distance calls before there was such a thing as a cell phone. I remember fondly ripping off Ma Bell in phone booths all across the country for years thanks to The Berkeley Barb’s illegal consumer guide.
The radical left was so homophobic that gay men were rare in the Yippie world until Jim Fouratt, one of the first gay activists, showed up at a rally to support Huey Newton at Yale University in New Haven and came out in between Black Panther speeches to rant about gay rights. Blacks may have had their Jim Crow laws to protest, but now it was time for “Mary Crow” laws to crumble too! Both the Panther men and the white Yippie men blanched at Fouratt’s demands. Here was a new militancy that completely threatened the left’s macho ideas. With no way to assimilate, these straight-guy leaders of both races were suddenly behind the times. All in one afternoon.
The Berkeley Barb was another useful radical publication—a weekly paper devoted to personal sex ads (thought to be very progressive at the time) and how-to advice about ripping off the establishment. Hidden in their classifieds were the actual AT&T codes, which changed annually, enabling you to invent phony working credit card numbers to make free long-distance calls before there was such a thing as a cell phone. I remember fondly ripping off Ma Bell in phone booths all across the country for years thanks to The Berkeley Barb’s illegal consumer guide.
The radical left was so homophobic that gay men were rare in the Yippie world until Jim Fouratt, one of the first gay activists, showed up at a rally to support Huey Newton at Yale University in New Haven and came out in between Black Panther speeches to rant about gay rights. Blacks may have had their Jim Crow laws to protest, but now it was time for “Mary Crow” laws to crumble too! Both the Panther men and the white Yippie men blanched at Fouratt’s demands. Here was a new militancy that completely threatened the left’s macho ideas. With no way to assimilate, these straight-guy leaders of both races were suddenly behind the times. All in one afternoon.
Was I the only gay man in the movement at the time who still felt excluded and hurt that there were no out queer men leaders in the Weathermen?
Lesbians had always had a gripe with left-wing men’s misogyny, but when Rat magazine came out and combined dyke power with militant feminist hetero-rage and a sense of humor against male pig behavior to women, a new Yippie message was born. The fully nude cover shots of “slum goddesses” announced that some left-wing men risked getting their asses kicked if something didn’t change. Underarm hair on women became the new rallying cry against the hippie male gaze. Fags and dykes together were a definite new wing of defiance.
Yet, was I the only gay man in the movement at the time who still felt excluded and hurt that there were no out queer men leaders in the Weathermen? How about the Chicago 7? Nope. All straight men. Did prophet John Africa tell any black gay men to join his back-to-nature group Move before or after the first shoot-out with Philadelphia police? If so, I never heard about them. Was I the only gay activist in the world who felt discriminated against when I realized there were no homos inside the Manson Family? Come on, Charlie, even the most insane, ridiculous or dangerous cult needs a little faggotry to ignite a revolution. I’m glad you’re dead. You were the piggy. A hetero one.
ACT UP finally came to the rescue, but many of my gay friends had to die of AIDS before that happened. Sure, at first there was the Radical Faeries group, but they were a little too hippie-dippie for me, and besides, I’d look stupid wearing wings and living in the woods of Guerneville. ACT UP took AIDS militancy and the idea of public theater, then mixed lesbian and gay men’s anger, and used it to wake up the world about the AIDS crisis. Larry Kramer may have been strident and obnoxious to some, but without his endless ranting about the slow testing of AIDS medications, many of my HIV-positive friends who barely made the cut between AZT and the new drugs of today would be no longer with us.
Yet, was I the only gay man in the movement at the time who still felt excluded and hurt that there were no out queer men leaders in the Weathermen? How about the Chicago 7? Nope. All straight men. Did prophet John Africa tell any black gay men to join his back-to-nature group Move before or after the first shoot-out with Philadelphia police? If so, I never heard about them. Was I the only gay activist in the world who felt discriminated against when I realized there were no homos inside the Manson Family? Come on, Charlie, even the most insane, ridiculous or dangerous cult needs a little faggotry to ignite a revolution. I’m glad you’re dead. You were the piggy. A hetero one.
ACT UP finally came to the rescue, but many of my gay friends had to die of AIDS before that happened. Sure, at first there was the Radical Faeries group, but they were a little too hippie-dippie for me, and besides, I’d look stupid wearing wings and living in the woods of Guerneville. ACT UP took AIDS militancy and the idea of public theater, then mixed lesbian and gay men’s anger, and used it to wake up the world about the AIDS crisis. Larry Kramer may have been strident and obnoxious to some, but without his endless ranting about the slow testing of AIDS medications, many of my HIV-positive friends who barely made the cut between AZT and the new drugs of today would be no longer with us.
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ACT UP were the warriors we always needed, chaining themselves to a New York Stock Exchange balcony to protest the high cost of AIDS treatment or shutting down the Food and Drug Administration for a day to press for a cure. Not since One magazine, the first gay radical publication, published the headline I AM GLAD I AM A HOMOSEXUAL, in 1958 (!), had there been such unsissy brave militancy, such in-your-face defiance! When one “affinity group” of ACT UP in New York City performed a brief memorial at Judson church for AIDS victim Mark Fisher (“I want my own political funeral to be fierce and deviant,” he had written before his death) and then walked the body in an open casket from Greenwich Village to George H.W. Bush’s campaign headquarters and “indicted” Bush for murder the day before the 1992 presidential elections, even the police kept their distance in shock and maybe secret respect. Bush lost to Clinton the next day but was never charged with a crime. The crime of silence.
ACT UP soldiers were knights in tarnished armor fighting in “cum-smeared tanks,” as John Rechy so touchingly and naively wrote in optimism years before the AIDS holocaust. Raiding a mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City to harass that asshole Cardinal John O’Connor, long an enemy of the gay community who had recently come out against safe-sex education in the schools, some gay radicals drew the line at one of the protesters who grabbed a communion wafer, broke it in half and threw it to the ground.
ACT UP soldiers were knights in tarnished armor fighting in “cum-smeared tanks,” as John Rechy so touchingly and naively wrote in optimism years before the AIDS holocaust. Raiding a mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City to harass that asshole Cardinal John O’Connor, long an enemy of the gay community who had recently come out against safe-sex education in the schools, some gay radicals drew the line at one of the protesters who grabbed a communion wafer, broke it in half and threw it to the ground.
Not me! The Catholic Church is our enemy. They have bashed me, my culture and everything I believe in from the beginning of A.D., so I have no guilt about bashing them back right now. The anti-pope march that was held against Benedict XVI in London in September 2010 was a festive occasion that I luckily attended. Such a cool and cute crowd of pissed-off gay kids and sympathizers of all races and sexual preferences. A sense of humor united all. FUCK THE POPE signs could be expected, but I WOULDN’T FUCK THE POPE was even better. FUCK THE POPE BUT USE A CONDOM reflected a new spin on political correctness. Of course, child abuse by the clergy and the covering up of this brotherhood of pedophiles was endlessly spotlighted (ABSTINENCE MAKES THE CHURCH GROW FONDLERS), and even new theories were floated with wit (JESUS HAD TWO DADDIES; OPIUM IS BETTER THAN RELIGION). “Pope? Nope!” chants went out, and when a big dyke activist leader yelled to the crowd, “What do we want?” and the intelligent and unviolent crowd yelled back, “Rational thought!” I knew English restraint had reached a new level. Rational thought? Not exactly the fighting words of revolution, but what the hell, wit can be spoken softly. THE POPE WEARS A STUPID HAT said one decidedly unaggressive protester’s sign. Could understatement be the new dangerous?
Do all the unrepentant abortion gals join the unbaptized babies in limbo who are still waiting in total darkness for the privilege of seeing God?
This new pope, Francis, the one everybody seems to love, is even worse, if you ask me. Anita Bryant did more for gay rights than this co-opting, faux-queer-friendly fraud ever did. At least Anita made us angry and inspired rebellion and fury against her stupid homophobia (which eventually ruined her career). But this new guy does nothing and pretends to be gay positive. Remember that song “Smiling Faces Sometimes” by the Temptations with the lyrics “Beware of the pat on the back. It just might hold you back”? This is Francis. “Good queer,” he seems to reply when he utters, “Who am I to judge?” about gay marriage. Who are you? You’re the fucking pope for Christ’s sake, that’s who you are!
He’s even worse to women than he is to homos. The ban on ordaining female priests in the Catholic Church will “last forever,” he recently announced. I guess his “Year of Mercy” is supposed to appease the weaker sex? Here he allows priests to forgive women who have had abortions—sort of like parking-ticket amnesty. He actually explained that these “expanded opportunities” would be under his order for “obtaining the indulgences.” Indulgences? Is he kidding? Didn’t indulgences go out with the Reformation? Again, he changes nothing. Abortion is still a “grave sin.” Do all the unrepentant abortion gals join the unbaptized babies in limbo who are still waiting in total darkness for the privilege of seeing God, yet are now forgotten by the Church, which fairly recently announced that the very concept of limbo had been discontinued?
Pope Francis believes in miracles even though his most recent rushed canonization of Mother Teresa came under scrutiny when doctors and state health officials debunked the claim that her prayers had cured a woman of cancer. Her cyst, not cancer, had been treated for months at a government hospital and destroyed thanks to medicine, not some Catholic hocus-pocus.
He’s even worse to women than he is to homos. The ban on ordaining female priests in the Catholic Church will “last forever,” he recently announced. I guess his “Year of Mercy” is supposed to appease the weaker sex? Here he allows priests to forgive women who have had abortions—sort of like parking-ticket amnesty. He actually explained that these “expanded opportunities” would be under his order for “obtaining the indulgences.” Indulgences? Is he kidding? Didn’t indulgences go out with the Reformation? Again, he changes nothing. Abortion is still a “grave sin.” Do all the unrepentant abortion gals join the unbaptized babies in limbo who are still waiting in total darkness for the privilege of seeing God, yet are now forgotten by the Church, which fairly recently announced that the very concept of limbo had been discontinued?
Pope Francis believes in miracles even though his most recent rushed canonization of Mother Teresa came under scrutiny when doctors and state health officials debunked the claim that her prayers had cured a woman of cancer. Her cyst, not cancer, had been treated for months at a government hospital and destroyed thanks to medicine, not some Catholic hocus-pocus.
College students, stop studying! Get your lazy overeducated asses out in the streets where you belong.
How about a real miracle for Pope Francis? He becomes the first man to get pregnant and we give him a year of no mercy on deciding what women should do with their own bodies. Not until he’s given birth to a female transgender Christ child of a different color will we indulge him with a little queer mercy of our own.
I’m a big fan of the Satanic Temple. These pro-separation-between-church-and-state, antireligious advocates who believe in Satan as a “metaphorical construct” are the closest thing we have today to the Yippies. I’m not a real satanist, of course, especially after Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan made it so showbiz cheesy in the 1960s. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t have a thing to wear to a goat sacrifice. But these new comic devil worshippers who have been billed as “First Amendment performance artists” who “offer tongue-in-cheek support to the fallen angel” know that the word satanist is a lightning rod for controversy that can be used for humorous activism. It’s hard not to rise to their hilarious devilish bait.
I first heard of this group when they did one of their “pink masses” at the gravesite of homophobe Christian lunatic Fred Phelps’s mother in Mississippi. A satanic graveside ritual performed after a religious enemy’s death that turns the deceased once-hetero spirit gay seemed like a perfect new sacrament to me. The Satanic Temple also installed a “snaketivity” display next to the Christian Nativity scene that was set up at the Michigan state capitol. You could see the confused look of the children as they gazed back and forth between Beelzebub and baby Jesus. A child’s right to choose is an important lesson in religious freedom we should all fight for.
I’m a big fan of the Satanic Temple. These pro-separation-between-church-and-state, antireligious advocates who believe in Satan as a “metaphorical construct” are the closest thing we have today to the Yippies. I’m not a real satanist, of course, especially after Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan made it so showbiz cheesy in the 1960s. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t have a thing to wear to a goat sacrifice. But these new comic devil worshippers who have been billed as “First Amendment performance artists” who “offer tongue-in-cheek support to the fallen angel” know that the word satanist is a lightning rod for controversy that can be used for humorous activism. It’s hard not to rise to their hilarious devilish bait.
I first heard of this group when they did one of their “pink masses” at the gravesite of homophobe Christian lunatic Fred Phelps’s mother in Mississippi. A satanic graveside ritual performed after a religious enemy’s death that turns the deceased once-hetero spirit gay seemed like a perfect new sacrament to me. The Satanic Temple also installed a “snaketivity” display next to the Christian Nativity scene that was set up at the Michigan state capitol. You could see the confused look of the children as they gazed back and forth between Beelzebub and baby Jesus. A child’s right to choose is an important lesson in religious freedom we should all fight for.
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When Bibles were allowed to be distributed in public schools in Florida, the Temple handed out a satanic coloring book to children in response. And in Oklahoma they unveiled plans to install right next to the Ten Commandments monument in the state capitol a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze statue of Baphomet, the horned and hooved totem of contemporary satanism, sitting on a throne while two sculpted innocent children look up to him in wonderment. When the Oklahoma State Supreme Court ordered the Ten Commandments removed, the Satanic Temple scrapped the plan and moved the devil statue to its Detroit branch, where a local pastor complained the ceremony was “a welcome-home party for evil.” It now rests unpeacefully in the Satanic Temple’s headquarters in…where else? Salem, Massachusetts.
Doug Mesner, a.k.a. Lucien Greaves, co-founder and spokesperson for the church, is charismatic in a demonic way. Yes, he wears all black and inverted-cross accessories, but what clinches his aura is a disfigured, scarred eye that never moves in its socket, which gives him a signature look that is at first unnerving and then just plain devilishly sexy. He’s a troublemaker in the tradition of Abbie Hoffman but still a serious fighter for freedom from religion, and he’s a staunch opponent of doctors who believe in “dissociative identity disorder,” also known as multiple personality syndrome, which resulted in the Satanic Panic that swept our country and imprisoned many innocent daycare workers following the McMartin school child-molestation hysteria. (They were innocent, just in case you forgot.) Lucien crashes psychiatric conventions and confronts publicly the doctors who still believe in such nonsense. You should join him. Send money. Spread the word before they commit you!
It’s time to go beyond the valley of the Red Army Faction, over the top of the Venceremos Brigade and beneath the valley of the Jewish Defense League to create a whole new brand of capitalist activism. One that uses a completely original positive form of comic terrorism to humiliate and embarrass our political and moral enemies. We can be rich, poor or the ever-vanishing in-between, but we need to regroup, conspire and attack with razor-sharp precision. College students, stop studying! High school kids have already walked out and made you look like slackers in the rebellion department. Get your lazy overeducated asses out in the streets where you belong. There’s no such thing as “undecided” anymore. This time, unlike the 1960s, we’re gonna win.
Don’t act up, ACT BAD! No matter what your sexual preference is, pretend you haven’t gotten laid in six months and use that horny drive for release in a political way. Join our little coup d’état and get out there and cause unrest no matter who’s running the show. Outside agitation is the fountain of youth. Let it flow.
Doug Mesner, a.k.a. Lucien Greaves, co-founder and spokesperson for the church, is charismatic in a demonic way. Yes, he wears all black and inverted-cross accessories, but what clinches his aura is a disfigured, scarred eye that never moves in its socket, which gives him a signature look that is at first unnerving and then just plain devilishly sexy. He’s a troublemaker in the tradition of Abbie Hoffman but still a serious fighter for freedom from religion, and he’s a staunch opponent of doctors who believe in “dissociative identity disorder,” also known as multiple personality syndrome, which resulted in the Satanic Panic that swept our country and imprisoned many innocent daycare workers following the McMartin school child-molestation hysteria. (They were innocent, just in case you forgot.) Lucien crashes psychiatric conventions and confronts publicly the doctors who still believe in such nonsense. You should join him. Send money. Spread the word before they commit you!
It’s time to go beyond the valley of the Red Army Faction, over the top of the Venceremos Brigade and beneath the valley of the Jewish Defense League to create a whole new brand of capitalist activism. One that uses a completely original positive form of comic terrorism to humiliate and embarrass our political and moral enemies. We can be rich, poor or the ever-vanishing in-between, but we need to regroup, conspire and attack with razor-sharp precision. College students, stop studying! High school kids have already walked out and made you look like slackers in the rebellion department. Get your lazy overeducated asses out in the streets where you belong. There’s no such thing as “undecided” anymore. This time, unlike the 1960s, we’re gonna win.
Don’t act up, ACT BAD! No matter what your sexual preference is, pretend you haven’t gotten laid in six months and use that horny drive for release in a political way. Join our little coup d’état and get out there and cause unrest no matter who’s running the show. Outside agitation is the fountain of youth. Let it flow.
Excerpted from MR. KNOW-IT-ALL: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux May 21, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by John Waters. All rights reserved. CAUTION: Users are warned that the Work appearing herein is protected under copyright laws and reproduction of the text, in any form for distribution is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the Work via any medium must be secured with the copyright owner.
