The film bothered me in a lot of ways I didn’t sort out until much later. This was 1991, remember, and I was struggling with my identity as a wee gay. The cross-dressing and bodybuilders and all that did nothing to convince me that gay was the way to go for me, because I knew in my heart that I wasn’t interested in those things. But midway through the film, Meat Loaf shows up on a motorcycle and a leather jacket and boy howdy did things light up there. Seeing him, and subconsciously understanding the implication that he and Dr. Frank N. Furter had had some sort of affair, fired something in my belly. Wait. Fat guys can be gay? This changes everything.
I probably can’t give Rocky sole credit for me having the courage to come out, but it deserves at least some of it. Still, the movie itself – beyond Meat Loaf’s all-to-brief appearance – rankled me. Then this kid, a friend of my downstairs neighbor, had it on video and insisted I see it again. I did … and something changed.
I’ve never been quite able to figure out what that change was. Maybe it wasn’t the particulars of the gayness, but the fact that it existed at all, in your face and loud as life. I came out at sixteen and while I was never an activist, I went to marches and was a peer leader and one time showed Rocky in my Gay Youth afterschool program. This kid Justin dressed up in fishnets, something I’d never had the balls to do.
Speaking of fishnets: my high school crush was into that part of it. His name was Mike and let me paint you a picture. He was seventeen, a year older than me, and could grow a beard. He was hairy and tall and a bit chubby and I was in love with him. I don’t mean like I admired him or I looked up to him – I mean those things, sure, but I was head over heels in love with him. He was the first man I ever loved, even though we were both boys at the time, and 1992 seems so antique now. He was into Rocky big time, and even after he found out I was in love with him, we talked about going into the Big City and seeing the show in the theater. I was wild to throw rice and toast and see Meat Loaf on the big screen. He was wild to put on fishnets and a bustier and girl it up a little bit. I encouraged this behavior, because I thought cross-dressing was akin to bisexuality, and that if he indulged his predilection for lady clothes, he might actually fall back in love with me. Of course that never happened, because first crushes never work out. We had sex, though, and even though it was a tiny bit disastrous, it’s still one of those memories I’ll always carry with me. I had the soundtrack to Rocky by that point, and during the floor show, Frank sings about, “erotic nightmares beyond any measure / and sensual daydreams to treasure forever.” Those lines helped me so much then and they still do: it’s a sex-healthy and a kink-healthy message; you let yourself be yourself and the rest just falls into place.
I never saw the show in the theater until I started seeing Shawn, now my de facto husband. I can’t actually quite remember my first time, but I know it was with my friend Tracey, who was just as scared as I was. Everyone was dressed up as the characters. I was not. I was scrawny and nervous and wearing used clothes I got from Savers, the Thrift Department Store. I knew to call out stuff, but all my information came from a series of comics that came out when I was still in high school; the callback lines were printed in the back. Bad: they had been sanitized for comic-reading kids during the last days of the Comics Code. Worse: there were three issues, and I’d somehow missed the last one. So while I was fairly confident in knowing the lines for the first two-thirds of the film, the end of it remained a mystery to me. But I’d get it eventually. That stuff comes in time. (In this movie, even time comes!)
I started going regularly in 2000, when Shawn still lived in Davis Square and I lived in Quincy and Tracey lived in Brookline. Shawn came once or twice, but it was a real Tracey and me thing. We’d meet up at Shawn’s and put our gear on (our gear at that point consisted of Tracey wearing angel wings and fishnets and right shirts, and me wearing devil horns and my Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts shirt, and putting my hair up like Xander from Buffy; I never said I was cool or subversive), then head out to the show in Harvard Square. After the show, we’d come back to Shawn’s – I’d get in his bed, Tracey would get the guest room – and in the morning, I’d walk Tracey to the train so she could get to work at 10. (One night, she’d forgotten her normal clothes, so when I walked her to the train, it looked like the tattered remnants of a particularly slutty one-night-stand. As she got in the train, I smiled and said, “Well it’s not mine, but I’ll pay for the scrape.” Her mouth dropped open. The doors slid shut. It was a good morning.)
We kept telling ourselves we’d do it every other week, to save money. Eventually, we realized we were going every weekend. So we just embraced it. The people there got to know us. Other regulars started to hang in our section. Because I’m a nerd, I spent way too much of my free time coming up with callback lines. The greatest thing that could happen to a Rocky regular is when one of the callback lines you make up continues when you’re gone. I brought in this silly “Skeletor! Skeletor!” line when Rocky’s in the tank; after being gone for a while, I came back and found out they were still doing it. It’s maybe dumb, but it made me so giddy. I contributed to this. It’s not high art, probably, but it’s art, and when I add to something like this, something big and traditional with a history as old as me, I can’t help but take a little pride in it.
The cast knew us by name. All the straight guys played it up for me because they knew I was into them. All the ladies and the gay guys did it for Tracey, because she was into them. It was a nice little give and take. Tracey and I became so well known that one Halloween, we went as each other, and everyone got it. Not to get too grandiose about going to see a movie over and over, but at one point I was struck by an epiphany: I was living my 20s in exactly the right way. I was writing novels, Buffy was on TV, I was in love with a man who loved me back and I had plans with my best friend every Saturday night. Those feelings come rarely in a life. I think I’ve had them four of five times over the course of my existence. I’m doing just what I’m supposed to, and I’m having a blast doing it.
I saw Rocky in Texas with a group of bear friends. My buddy Joe introduced me to an outtake song I’d never heard of. And when it came out on DVD, I bought it and watched all the special features. Rocky wasn’t the whole of my life, but it was major.
Things, of course, fall apart. Tracey drifted away from the movie before I did. I liked going alone, but I didn’t like it enough to keep going alone. So I drifted away, too. Wrote books. Found theater. You find ways to keep yourself afloat in the wake of good stuff ending. Some people accuse me of chasing the dragon, of trying to continually replicate the original best experiences by doing the same thing over and over. But that’s not true. There is no try. I revel in repeat experiences because there’s safety in recurrent joy, yeah, but because there’s also nuance and change and history and tradition and friends. It’s that way with improv and karaoke and Disney and Springsteen concerts and King novels and everything I do, every thing I love. You form a structure for your life and you live inside it, because it’s comforting and warm, but it’s never exactly the same. It’s always just different enough to keep me coming back.
I was heartbroken when I found out the Harvard Square theater was closing. It's moving to Boston Common in August (yay!), but Rocky had been In Harvard for twenty-eight years – most of my existence. I’d come back recently with my buddy Marty, which reignited my love of the show (since, I’d been to the show in Chelsea in NYC twice with Marty and/or my buddy Duncan, who has a poster of the show up in his house). Last week, the penultimate week, I came back with my friend Vickie and everyone knew my name. Vickie had only been to the show once and she had a great time; she indulged me in my callbacks and did the Time Warp and threw rice with the rest of us. I had a legitimate panic that she wouldn’t want to come this week for the final Harvard Square show, but she showed up in her fetching black dress with her hair pulled back. I came in my I HEART CHUBBY BEARDED DUDES T-shirt and my yellow bunny ears and my pink Chucks, for that is apparently how I roll.
At the start of the night, they usually do a Virgin Ceremony, where they find a bunch of folks in the audience who have never been to the show and have them do something degrading, and then pop their cherry onstage (it’s a red balloon, like in Lucky Charms). Last night, they changed things up and asked people who had been over 350 times to come up onstage. Folks, I have wanted to be on that stage for years, and now there I was, up in those lights looking back at that giant, rowdy audience of hundreds. I used to have this insane fantasy that the guy playing Brad got sick and his understudy wasn’t available, and they had to scour the audience for someone who knew the role well enough. I did.
Only then did they ask for actual virgins, and then we, as lifers, got to pick our own. I of course went for a chubby, bearded guy in the front. Because hot damn was he foxy. Our mission, we learned, was to switch clothes on stage. Now, I’d seen this guy in line and thought idly about getting into his pants, but this was a dream come true. His shirt was huge on me, and he managed somehow to squeeze into my I HEART CHUBBY BEARDED DUDES shirt. Erotic nightmares. Sensual daydreams. Night. MADE. We lost … but did we? Did we indeed?
The whole show was a little bittersweet, but I wasn’t at all rusty this week (even though I forgot some stuff). I got the bun dance line down. A guy near me and I were trading lines off. A lesbian couple in front of me found most of my lines hilarious. After the show, they turned the house lights on, and all 300 of us freaks and weirdos and outcasts in the theater stood up. And they blasted “Don’t Stop Believin’” over the loudspeakers. All 300 of us sang along and cheered in unison. If I ever needed another moment for an epiphany, there it is.
Things change. The center doesn’t hold. Friends drift away and people are never the same way that they were when you knew them best. But it’s like Bob Seger says: rock and roll never forgets. Rocky changed me, saved me, made me feel like being myself was okay. Whenever I want it again, it’ll be right there, waiting for me. The movie never ends. It goes on and on and on.
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