Drag queens and obscenity charges: the experimental movie that went all the way to trial
We associate the 1960s with a time of increased sexual freedom and experimentation, but it was hardly a liberated decade, for let’s not forget how much backlash many artists received at this time.
In 1963, the avant-garde short film Flaming Creatures was released, directed by underground filmmaker Jack Smith, but don’t be fooled by the director possessing the most ordinary name ever, as his film was crazy, moving through images of orgies and Marilyn Monroe-esque vampires, with gender and sexuality remaining totally ambiguous.
Drag queens and transvestites form most of the cast, and there are some pretty explicit scenes featuring naked bodies and sexual acts. One of the characters even asks, “Is there lipstick that doesn’t come off when you suck cocks?” Now that’s a great line.
For a film made in 1963, this was outrageous, and naturally, it quickly had people feeling repulsed, disgusted and violated. Flaming Creatures was praised as a work of camp brilliance by Susan Sontag, while the film also found a big fan in legendary director Jonas Mekas, who screened the film at New York’s New Bowery Theatre in 1964. He wanted people to see this bizarre film, a raw and utterly intuitive, impulsive, and rebellious act of queer pride and disregard for rules and regulations. If the government wasn’t going to accept homosexuality as a perfectly normal thing, why should Smith make something that complied with this vision of a repressed America?
Graphic depictions of homosexuality might have been banned under the Hays Code in Hollywood, but Smith made a home for himself in the underground scene, where he could make something as crazy and obnoxious as possible. Flaming Creatures was shot in grainy black-and-white, and you’re unlikely to find a good quality version of the film these days since, when Smith shot the film, he opted for out-of-date 16mm. The movie is available, regardless, and in all of its pixelated glory, you can find it floating about online, the low quality slightly obscuring the full explicitness of this 40-minute work of graphic experimentalism.
When Mekas screened the film, the police raided the theatre and arrested him and several other staff members, and soon they were put to trial, where Sontag and poet Allen Ginsberg were part of the defence who argued in favour of the film as nothing more than a harmless work of art. Unfortunately for Mekas, he was convicted for screening such obscenity, although he eventually wound up with a suspended sentence.
It’s quite extraordinary that screening a movie featuring explicit homosexuality and nudity could lead to arrests and Supreme Court trials, but back then, a film containing images like those in Flaming Creatures was unlike anything people were used to. We’ve come a long way since then, and thanks to Smith’s courageous artistic vision, he paved the way for further boundary-pushing experimentation in the underground; just look at John Waters and Divine, whose collaborations began just a few years later.
Decades after Mekas was prosecuted, the man responsible, Gerald Harris, reached out to the filmmaker after reading about him and apologised. About 50 years had passed, but Harris came to realise the mistake he’d made in condemning Mekas for showing a piece of art. “Although my appreciation of free expression and aversion to censorship developed more fully as I matured, I should have sooner acted more courageously,” he wrote to Mekas in an email.
Flaming Creatures was one of the few films that Smith made, who was also a photographer and performance artist when he wasn’t shooting drag queens having sex with each other. You could also see him in films himself, appearing in the likes of Andy Warhol’s Camp and the slasher Silent Night, Bloody Night, which featured various Warhol superstars. Flaming Creatures remains his most iconic work, though, purely because it crossed so many boundaries and caused major uproar in the process, and more often than not, that is a sign of something good.
