GLR September-October 2024

being quite at home anywhere. You know, that’s sort of part of the queer experience. PT: I often hear your movies compared to those of John Wa ters. What do you think of that comparison? BLaB: Of course, John’s films greatly influenced me, especially his early movies like Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs . I borrowed a lot from his strategies of shock value and shocking for the sake of shock. And leaning into all the filthy aspects of life that disrupt polite society and make people turn up their noses. That’s always fun, but John does it with elegance and panache. His movies are very astute in a satirical way. John has been a great friend and mentor. Whenever he can, he comes to my film premiers in New York and lends his support. He had me down to the Provincetown Film Festival this past year, and they gave me the Filmmaker on the Edge Award. PT: John Waters has a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Would you like to have one too? BLaB: John was thrilled about it because the stretch of Holly wood Boulevard that has his star is so trashy, like homeless peo ple vomiting on the stars of yesteryear. PT: You like to make homeless people sexy. What’s that all about? BLaB: I got that from Samuel Delaney and his famous book TheMadMan , about a character who had a sexual fetish for the homeless, which I always wanted to make into a movie. In Hustler White , Rick Castro and I were obsessed with home less guys on Santa Monica Boulevard. We’d go window shop ping, looking at all the hustlers driving up and down the strip. And we’d see these guys who were ripped, clearly homeless, but their shirts were open, and for some reason they always had a black grease stain on their chest. I don’t know where all this grease came from, but we put it in Hustler White . At the end, I have black grease hair dye, and I wipe it on Tony Ward’s chest. It always stimulated my imagination to think how somebody who looks like a model with a ripped body ended up, you know, homeless and hustling on Santa Monica Boulevard. A lot of peo ple come to make it big in Hollywood, and a lot of them fall through the cracks and end up living on the street or being ad dicted to drugs. But there’s something still very sexy about them. It’s poverty porn. PT: How would you like to be remembered? BLaB: Oh, God, I’m not into this idea of immortality in that sense. I will say that the one thing that kind of keeps me going is that I do get a lot of feedback from people who say that my work gave them permission to be queer, gave them permission to explore their pornographic imagination, gave them permis sion to have an identity outside of the orthodox or conventional way of being gay. And that my work has really influenced them. When they felt isolated, when they felt alienated from gays, or from the mainstream world, I gave them hope and kind of some direction. So that’s what keeps me going. Like this idea that I’m actually having a positive influence on people, on queer peo ple. Because, when I was young and alienated and feeling sui cidal and bullied and all that stuff, it was movies that gave me hope. So I’m sort of giving back in that way. September–October 2024

It’s closing time for an alarming number of gay bars in cities around the globe— but it’s definitely not the last dance “An accessible, absorbing look into an evolving form of queer culture, written by a brilliant sociologist.” — Library Journal , starred review

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