John Waters was not of legal drinking age, which was 18 in Maryland, when he first ventured downtown to the now-legendary Martick’s Tyson Street Tavern. He was still in high school. “My mother would drive me from Lutherville to Martick’s and drop me off in the alley next door,” Waters says. “My mother was kind of amazing. She didn’t understand me, but she said, ‘Maybe you’ll meet people like you here.’ My parents were conservative, upper-middle class. How would she even know about a place like Martick’s?”

In mid-century Baltimore, a lunch-pail city no one yet described as quirky, charming, or artsy, Martick’s was one of few LGBTQ-friendly bars around. Although that term obviously wasn’t part of the vernacular of the early 1960s, when the crowd there included beatniks, cross-dressers, transgender individuals, and poets, artists, and musicians of all shapes and stripes.

His mother’s intuition proved spot on. Waters hung around outside and regulars snuck him drinks. When owner Morris Martick wasn’t around, they’d bring him inside. Waters not only met his tribe at Martick’s, but many of his future filmmaking co-conspirators. Among them: Emmy-winning casting director Pat Moran, who was then studying dance; actor, projectionist, and later Fells Point theater owner George Figgs; and bartender and model Maelcum Soul, who starred in two of Waters’ first films, Roman Candles and Eat Your Makeup and died at 27 of an overdose. “A true beatnik goddess,” says Waters, glancing at a framed photograph of Soul in his home office.

At the same time, Waters became friends with a heavyset, gay, neighborhood teenager named Harris Glenn Milstead, later famous as the 300-pound siren of Waters’ early films and by his stage name, Divine. As Waters’ circle grew, he was introduced to Van Smith and Vincent Peranio, who studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and took up make-up artistry and set designing, respectively. He also met hairdresser-actor David Lochary, and actress Nancy Paine Stole, whom he nicknamed Mink. Childhood pal Mary Vivian Pearce was part of the crew and cast, too, all of whom shared an interest in art, film, and marijuana, and who Waters coined the Dreamlanders.

Notably, it was also at Martick’s where he met Harvey Alexander, who launched the Baltimore Film Festival in 1969. He showcased the fledging Waters’ short film The Diane Linkletter Story in 1970, and two years later, a certain outrageous, funny, sexual, gross, and occasionally banned movie named Pink Flamingos, officially released 50 years ago this month. (On St. Patrick’s Day, a nice coincidence for Waters and his subversive band, many of whom like him were rebelling against the heavy-handed Catholicism of their youth.)

Waters describes the film—made with $12,000 borrowed from his father—as “a terrorist act against the tyranny of good taste,” a pretty accurate tagline. The scandalous comedy was the first in Waters’ iconic trilogy, with Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977), earning him the endearing moniker, The Pope of Trash. It was also an immediate underground hit in Baltimore, selling out nine shows over its first three days of screening.

“People who never came out of their closets came out [to see it],” Alexander told The Evening Sun, calling Pink Flamingos “the freak event of the year.”

For those who haven’t seen Pink Flamingos, a quick plot summary is in order. It may be disturbing, but it is not overly complicated. Divine plays an underground criminal femme fatale, who the tabloids have labeled “The Filthiest Person Alive.” Hiding out in a pink trailer on the outskirts of Baltimore County, with, yes, a pair of pink flamingos in the yard, she seeks anonymity (as if such a thing were possible) under the pseudonym “Babs Johnson.”

She lives with her mentally-ill mother, Edie (Edith Massey), wayward son, Crackers (Danny Mills), and companion, Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). Meanwhile, a pair of resentful rivals, the Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole), who deal heroin to inner-city children and kidnap and impregnate young hitchhikers—selling the offspring to lesbian couples—scheme to usurp Divine’s title. Voyeurism, vomiting, rape, castration, cannibalism, masturbation, murder, and more ensue.

Notoriously, Divine consumes dog feces in the closing scene. One of her birthday party celebrants, played by David Gluck, who remained anonymous until he passed away in June 2020, lip-syncs, if that’s the right term, The Trashman’s hit “Surfin’ Bird” with his anus for a full minute. It was the only movie appearance by Gluck, who became a Social Security computer analyst.

“When we had the 25th anniversary and Pink Flamingos was shown in regular theaters,” Waters told The Baltimore Sun, “he’d go to the movies and when his scene came on he’d tap the per- son on the shoulder in front of him and say, ‘That’s me.’” It is an anecdote as good as any that illustrates the weird but good-hearted humor beneath all of Waters’ films.

If you’re not a Baby Boomer, or Baby Boomer adjacent, you wouldn’t remember the rise of the cult classic and midnight movies, or that Pink Flamingos played a starring role in the 1970s phenomenon, predating The Rocky Horror Picture Show and David Lynch’s Eraserhead by several years. In fact, Pink Flamingos was the second original midnight film ever screened, after Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid western El Topo, at New York’s innovative Elgin Theater, where the madness got started, and the first to receive national exposure.

Even if that were Pink Flamingos’ only cinematic contribution, it would have been remarkable. Banned in several cities, and several countries, the movie left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape that reverberates to this day. With its DIY ethos, retro, thrift shop wardrobes, neon-haired villains—try finding film characters before Raymond and Connie Marbles with similarly wild dye jobs—it was at once a precursor to the ’70s punk movement and a seminal example of independent filmmaking.

The sets were inexpensive. The furniture was what became known as midcentury modern. The whole thing has an anarchic Technicolor feel. Even the soundtrack blended genres, juxtaposing rockabilly, surf music, and the ’50s doo-wop of Waters’ youth. And with her bawdy, larger-than-life, and at times menacing presence—coupled with a touching vulnerability—Divine altered the course of drag and beyond, inspiring not just current smash hit RuPaul’s Drag Race but Ursula the Witch in The Little Mermaid, a Disney film of all things.

By 1971, a time of great cultural upheaval, there seemingly wasn’t much left to knock down regarding social mores and traditional “values,” one of Waters’ lifelong artistic themes. Whatever mores were left standing in 1971, he took a chainsaw to with Pink Flamingos, brandishing his own personal, peculiar, subversive sense of humor. If “flower power” hadn’t fully shaken suburban America from its slumber and stereotypes, perhaps raw shock would. In Waters’ films, the outcasts—the obese, homosexual, and neurotic—were depicted as family-oriented protagonists worth rooting for long before gay marriage, transgender rights, and body-positive campaigns were on anyone’s radar. Self-righteousness, jealousy, intolerance, cruelty, and pretentiousness were the enemy.

The irony is that several months ago, a half-century after it was derided by so many—in 1974, Variety called it “one of the most vile, stupid, and repulsive films ever made”—Pink Flamingos was named to the prestigious National Film Registry. The Criterion Collection also plans to restore the film and re-release it as part of their acclaimed trove.

“I wish I was from Baltimore,” says Susan Arosteguy of the Criterion Collection, by way of expressing her appreciation for Waters’ films. “It was a time and place that couldn’t happen again.”

“Pink Flamingos was a reaction to everything happening in the fall of 1971 when we made it,” says Waters, who was 25 when he wrote, directed, and produced the film. “Horror and exploitation movies were in theaters. Not just European art-house nudity, but pornography, too. Nothing was illegal. Nothing was against the law. That was the challenge.”

Pink Flamingos is such a part of the film canon, it’s almost impossible to remember how terrified “the squares” were by it. One person never amused by Waters’ films was Mary Avara, the ultra-conservative head of the Maryland State Board of Censors. During her tenure, from 1960 until the board’s demise in 1981, she became a celebrity in her own right for making things miserable for Waters. Once called “America’s Mother Superior of Censors,” she appeared on network TV defending her cultural gatekeeping to Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson, among others. “Waters!” she told one interviewer. “I don’t even want to discuss him. Makes my mouth feel dirty.”

“We really all did love film,” says Pat Moran, an original Dreamlander, who went on to win Emmys for casting on Homicide: Life on the Streets, HBO’s VEEP, and HBO’s Game Change. “We took it seriously. Although I’m not sure why,” she adds with a laugh. “We knew enough to show up on time and know your lines. We didn’t know what a gaffer was or any of the positions. It wasn’t happening in a vacuum, however,” Moran adds.

“We knew Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith and the films they were making in New York.”

Waters, as most of his fans probably know by now, got kicked out of New York University’s film school for smoking pot. In expelling Waters, the university informed Mr. and Mrs. Waters that their son needed psychiatric counseling. Ambitious, smart, gay, artistic, and compulsively well-read, he found that his outrageous films were all the expression and therapy he required. As many Waters admirers also likely know, he was a puppeteer before he was a filmmaker, which he notes is rather common among directors. He served as the primary camera operator on all his films before Polyester in 1981 and refers to his earliest works as “my film school.”

“MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY’RE NORMAL BUT THEY’RE NOT. I LIVE IN BALTIMORE, AND IT’S FULL OF PEOPLE LIKE THAT.” —JOHN WATERS

Less common were his eclectic influences. He took equal pleasure and influence from high-brow, art house films—going to Ingmar Bergman films at Goucher College as a teenager—as well as sleazy exploitation films in downtown Baltimore theaters. “I was attracted to any type of extreme,” he says.

The 50th anniversary of Pink Flamingos has provided Waters the occasion to reflect on its making, which was a grind at times. The kind only possible when you’re young, he says. The outdoor scenes were shot during winter, often on weekends at Divine’s friend Bob Adams’ local farm—and 12-to-15-hour days was the norm. Divine and Van Smith would awaken before dawn to apply Divine’s makeup. At least with Pink Flamingos, no one was arrested during the shooting, as had been case during the making of Mondo Trasho.

“Pink Flamingos is an assault on the senses, but it’s not just an assault on the senses,” says Mink Stole, who would appear in nearly every Waters film over the course of a wide-ranging career. “The set designs, the juxtapositions, the color compositions of everything, the wardrobe—it was also a feast for the senses. I do also find it astounding, and I’m grateful, that 50 years later it is still out there and considered outrageous, and people give a whatever about what we did so long ago.”

Marketing and getting the film screened was another kind of creative process, and also a complete guerrilla operation. Not all filmmakers possess both skill sets, but Waters always has. Initially, that meant screenings in church basements, on college campuses, at art galleries, and tiny independent theaters. The goal in those days was simply making enough money to keep making films.

“With Pink Flamingos, I got the University of Baltimore to rent me directly the whole auditorium, and we had the premiere there,” Waters recalls. “There were posters and everything. It was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday shows at eight, 10, and midnight. And all three were filled out every night, and I could tell from the reaction that it worked. But then it took me years really to find the real distributor to put it out.”

The official trailer for the film eventually put out by then-new New Line Cinema remains a treasure. There’s not a single clip of the actual film, just reaction interviews on afterward with people leaving the theater in various states of shock, disgust, and delight.

Meanwhile, the censorship battles along the way were in real courtrooms with real judges and juries. As late as 1990, an Orange County, Florida, grand jury indicted a local video store for renting it to a 14-year-old. Inevitably, those episodes tickled Waters, well, pink.

“We never ever won a case, even though the Museum of Modern Art bought a print right in the beginning, which was pretty amazing,” Waters says. “I thought when they bought it for the permanent collection it would get us off with every jury.

“[Juries] weren’t impressed, because as I’ve said forever, but it’s really true: At midnight, with a group of people, Pink Flamingos is joyous. At 8 a.m., when you are being sworn in with strangers for jury duty, it is most definitely obscene.”

You study U.S. history. What struck you about Baltimore’s identity in particular that made you want to write this book?
I’d been studying HonFest for a few years when I got the idea for this book. About a decade ago, I was being filmed for a reality TV show pilot about a group of Baltimore Hons, which was a surreal experience. But even though the show never got picked up, it made me realize that Baltimore had a cultural meaning. It meant something to people, even those who had never been there. Culture was part of what defined that.

This was solidified for me in 2016 when former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley ran in the Democratic primary. It seemed like someone at every debate and interview asked him about The Wire, a fictional TV show about Baltimore’s drug trade. This cultural text about Baltimore had become the image of the city, so much so that it affected national politics. I wanted to dig into how that happened historically.

How did you get involved with HonFest?
I learned about HonFest through a documentary film about social class in America called People Like Us in 1999. At the time I was in grad school, studying class identity and culture and was fascinated by HonFest. I went that summer. Back then, HonFest was more a regular neighborhood festival, rather than the behemoth it is now. But it still had the Best Hon competition in which women dress up as Baltimore Hons, or white working-class women of the 1960s. That year, and for a few years after, I interviewed Hons, business owners, neighborhood residents, and people on the street, trying to understand this phenomenon of reviving this kitschy history while Hampden was gentrifying.

While I’m critical of how HonFest simplifies Baltimore’s history to make it palatable for tourists, through this research I got to know some of the Hons, like Rita Moore, Heidi Moore Trasatti, and Charlene Osborne, who are lovely, generous people, and who dress up as Hons with a great deal of respect and love for their family history.

Why was it important for you to look at Baltimore’s history through the lens of the arts, rather than, say, business/industry, ethnic customs, neighborhoods, or other factors that play into a city’s identity?
The arts are connected to all those things. We often think of art as a separate sphere unsullied by the base concerns of the world, but the arts have been connected to politics, the economy, and racial, ethnic, and neighborhood identity in Baltimore for decades. In fact, it’s the deep relationship between politics, the economy, and the arts that makes it an important lens to see Baltimore’s history through. I argue that starting with Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s administration in 1971, the arts explicitly became a way to create an image of Baltimore to draw visitors and new residents and an economic force in their own right. From the Charm City PR campaign in 1974 to Artscape today, the city government has made art and image central to the city’s renaissance.

In what ways can the arts can be more effective than politics in ushering in new movements?
Look at John Waters’ early movies. In Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, he’s got these great scenes of Divine with full makeup, dress and heels, sashaying through downtown Baltimore like she’s on a fashion runway. Those are real people reacting to her, not extras. Imagine what it was like for queer kids around the country to see someone so unabashedly and visibly queer walking on public streets in the middle of the day. At a time when a gay rights movement was still cohering, Waters’ films had a pretty radical vision of gender and sexual non-conformity. I think you can draw a line between those films and what trans and gender nonbinary activists are doing today.

You, as well as others, write about Baltimore being a city divided. Do you see ways in which people or ideas are bridging that gap, or do you see it widening?
One of the points I make in the book is that Baltimore is a microcosm. Its problems are the problems facing all medium-sized cities in this country. Baltimore’s problems are America’s problems.

I’d like to be hopeful, but I don’t see substantive, positive change happening in our current political climate, either locally in Baltimore or nationally. It’s not just a republican versus democrat issue. It’s an issue of promoting policies that will benefit average people, not just those at the top. For decades, Baltimore prioritized its image to outsiders over the needs of its people, which exacerbated divisions by pumping money into downtown areas to spur gentrification and displacement. That needs to change.

Art has a role in this, by the way. Artists have big imaginations. They can help us understand the problems facing the city in nuanced ways, like David Simon does in The Wire or Theo Anthony in Rat Film. They can also help us come together to find solutions. I’m so inspired by the young poets I’ve met through Writers in Baltimore Schools and DewMore Baltimore who definitely have the vision to help us map out a better future if we listen.

Can you talk a little about the Chicory magazine you discovered during your research for this book, and why you were inspired to make it available online?Chicory was a magazine published by the Enoch Pratt Free Library from 1966 to 1983, thanks to two librarians, Evelyn Levy and Thelma Bell. Using money from the War on Poverty, they hired local poet Sam Cornish who worked with kids and teens in East Baltimore, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, to create a poetry and art magazine.

What made Chicory special was that it wasn’t edited. What people submitted was basically published as is. They even published what the editors overheard as a kind of poetry called “Street Chatter.” For a historian, this is an amazing peek into what regular people thought about the world during a tumultuous time in the city’s and country’s history. People wrote about local and national politics, from the 1968 riot to police suppression of the Black Panther Party. They also talked about their daily lives. This magazine was the voice of black, working-class Baltimore in its time. And some people who published in it went on to become well-known writers, like poet Afaa Michael Weaver, Terry Edmonds, the first African American presidential speechwriter, and journalist Rafael Alvarez.

Because its content is still relevant, I wanted to make sure that it was accessible to folks today. I worked with Pratt to digitize the collection, which is now online through Digital Maryland. You can also follow on Instagram, where we feature poems and art from the magazine.

Read our review of Rizzo’s latest book, here.

Brewers have drawn inspiration from a ton of things about Baltimore—its history, its landmarks, its sports teams. And this spring, two local breweries will be debuting progressive pours that shed light on Baltimore’s LGBTQ community.

Adding to its year-round, core lineup for the first time in two years, Union Craft Brewing is releasing Divine IPA in March, a “perversely hoppy ale” with notes of orange, guava, and tropical fruit hops. That same month, DuClaw Brewing is debuting Sour Me Unicorn Farts, a collaboration between the Rosedale brewery and Diablo Doughnuts that tastes like a familiar fruity cereal.

“Yeah, I mean we sat around the bar and ate cereal. We had to start there,” says brewer Mike Kulha of DuClaw. “We then did research on what the flavors actually were, and this took a fair amount of trial and error. Drinking a beer is also very different than eating a doughnut. We used real fruit puree, which adds a fuller mouthfeel so the texture is more like a doughnut. It was an interesting process for sure.”

Unicorn Farts is the latest iteration of DuClaw’s “Sour Me” series and its most unique yet, drawing inspiration from the dessert of the same name at Diablo Doughnuts. The pilsner and wheat grain base includes Fruity Pebbles notes and edible glitter mixed in for a colorful, slightly tart sour with a bouquet of fruits and hint of biscuit. Similarly, for Union, it was about doing something special and standing out from the crowded IPA pack.

“When adding a beer to our core lineup, there are a lot of boxes to check,” says Union co-founder and creative director Jon Zerivitz. “It has to draw from Baltimore culture and have a unique story. We really wanted this brand to stand out amongst all the competition, especially in the IPA category. Divine checks those boxes and more.”

He notes that the pink and purple color palette and more “feminine” look of the beer sets it apart and avoids some played-out branding cliches in the beer world. This idea is also echoed in the flavor profile of Divine IPA, which is described as a “bright, juicy, hop-forward beer with a soft pillowy malt background.” Kegs of the beer will be tapped in the DMV area in March, followed by cans in April. DuClaw will be releasing its unicorn-themed beer at a party on March 16 at the brewery with hopes of additional events during Baltimore Pride.

“We are hoping this beer can do even more for Baltimore once it’s released this spring, specifically in support of our LGBTQ community,” says DuClaw’s director of marketing Madeline Caldwell. “We’re talking with GLCCB/Pride about a potential partnership, and are sponsoring TechniQ, the monthly queer dance party on the third Friday of every month at The Crown. I think we’re just scratching the surface here, though.”

While Union says this beer wasn’t made specifically for any demographic, they like that the ethos of Divine—both in name and spirit—is a fitting symbol for more inclusivity in the beer world and beyond.

“We didn’t set out to market to women on the LGBTQ community, but wanted to recognize their place in the consumer market,” Zerivitz says. “Divine, the actor and character, represents an open-minded, free to let your freak flag fly, more progressive and tolerant Baltimore.”

In the 1960s, New York had counterculture artist Andy Warhol with his “Factory,” where beautiful people of all stripes came together to party, do drugs, have sex, and make art. In the ’70s, Baltimore had John Waters and his “Dreamlanders,” a ragtag group of outsiders, weirdos, and misfits who comprised the cast and crew of his subversive films. (And perhaps had sex and did drugs—hey, that’s their business.)

After all these years, it’s important to remember what a rebel Waters was in the early days. His films were designed to discomfit and shock; he wanted to eat the rich and take down the bourgeoisie. He famously scuffled with Maryland’s draconian censor board, and his movies were banned in several countries. In Baltimore, he was initially embraced only by arthouse fanatics and punks, but eventually—first with Pink Flamingos, then Polyester, and ultimately with his breakthrough hit, Hairspray—he was embraced by the mainstream.
Hairspray has become something of a cottage industry, but the original film shouldn’t be confused with the more mild-mannered (if still delightful) versions that followed. Waters’ Hairspray was a wonderful celebration of diversity and a takedown of racism, but it also had a scuzziness around the edges that the subsequent iterations lacked. (It also featured a touching and widely acclaimed performance by Waters’ dear friend the drag queen Divine, who tragically died shortly after the film debuted.)

By the time Cry Baby came around, Baltimore had already begun to commodify the kitsch of his films—selling pink flamingo lawn figurines and hairspray cans in his honor. Somehow, the notion of the “Hon”—so integral to Baltimore’s Charm City concept—became wrapped up in the Waters iconography. But in a 2008 article in USA Today, Waters swore off the word and even the Honfest. “To me, it’s used up,” he said. “The people that celebrate it are not from it. I feel that in some weird way they’re looking slightly down on it. I only celebrate something I can look up to.”

This is the most crucial aspect of Waters’ art. If you think he’s making fun of the Edie the Egg Lady, you’re missing the point. He loves these people, and he respects them, too. The world of John Waters is all-inclusive. The only people he judges are those who judge others. What could be more Baltimore than that?

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect the results of the November 13 Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation hearing.

Jesse Salazar and Tom Williams approached acclaimed street artist Gaia about a year ago to ask if he would be interested in painting the side of their Mount Vernon rowhome. But the couple couldn’t have planned a better week to finally get their three-story portrait of Baltimore-bred drag icon Divine.

An unplanned break freed up Gaia’s schedule this month, and he called Salazar and Williams to see if they wanted to pull the trigger on the ambitious private commission before he headed off to the Netherlands on October 24. They did.

The stars seemed to have aligned. The project began October 15 and, four days later, the day Divine (born Harris Glenn Milstead) would have been 73 years old, Gaia was painting. Just two miles straight north, a John Waters retrospective graces one of the Baltimore Museum of Art‘s special exhibition galleries.

“The timing is perfect and it’s strange,” Gaia says. “It’s sort of surreal that there isn’t already a monument to her in the city.”

The image chosen for the mural is from the cover of Divine’s 1984 single, “I’m So Beautiful,” and photographer Greg Gorman’s graphic style fit right in with Gaia’s aesthetic. But Salazar says the message is for those both familiar and unfamiliar with that particular track.

“We asked Gaia to create this mural as a tribute to Divine and the city’s queer history,” he says. “Our feeling was that, at a time when LGBT rights are being threatened, we hoped that beauty would inspire others to know that they, too, are beautiful, and the message that she’s sending to Baltimore I think is timely and important. For those who know Divine, it’s a celebration of her strength. And for those who don’t know her, I loved the image of this bold woman saying ‘I am beautiful.'”

The piece feels even more timely in the wake of this week’s news that the Trump administration is considering defining gender in a way that would threaten the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people across the country.

As members of the LGBTQ community and its allies proclaim “we will not be erased,” this image has emerged in one of Baltimore’s historic “gayborhoods” to celebrate queer history, identity, and acceptance.

While Salazar says support for the mural in the neighborhood has been strong, the work has run into some trouble with the city. During the final day of painting, Gaia was approached by a city inspector who said there had been complaints about the mural. The piece was never authorized by the Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, which head of CHAP Eric Holcomb says must approve all exterior changes in local historic districts. Salazar is now working with the city to submit an application to keep the mural in place.

“There’s probably no other person you could paint and have it be this important, that I can think of, for that location,” Gaia says. “Whether or not the city wants to fight a monument that should exist is like, just don’t. The kind of compliments I’ve been getting, you can tell it’s really touching people.”

As it stands, the mural on East Preston Street is the only such work dedicated to Divine in the city. (Though there are constant unofficial tributes to Milstead at his gravesite in Towson.) Previous public efforts to create a monument made it through the bureaucratic hurdles only to be derailed by a lack of funding. As news of the mural has spread, support has poured in from Divine’s fans and public art supporters from Baltimore and beyond.

The image was shared multiple times by the official Divine Instagram account, and John Waters visited to pose with the mural Tuesday afternoon. Noah Brodie, CEO of Divine’s estate, sent a letter to CHAP in support of the new piece. In it he says, “It’s an inspiring message for counter-culture types, the LGBTQ community, and those affirming body positive representation. In many ways, she represents the strength of Baltimore’s character, and serves as a reminder of the city’s perseverance and authenticity. Divine is brassy, bold, and beautiful; just like Baltimore.”

The statement was echoed by Christian Larsen, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at The Met in his own letter of support. “The message your city sends of diversity, difference, acceptance and even celebration of one of your most daring and bold personalities is exactly what these dark times call for,” he wrote. “We are every day more at risk of falling prey to fear, prejudice, and discrimination against any and all communities that don’t conform to an increasingly narrow definition of normal. Baltimore is anything but normal. It dares to be different. Out of respect for all your citizens, please keep it that way.”

On November 13, CHAP met for its monthly hearing. Last on the agenda was a request from Salazar for retroactive approval of the “I’m So Beautiful” mural. In addition to the multiple letters of support and 4,200-plus Change.org petition signatures Salazar provided as evidence for why the mural should stay, Holcomb had requested two questions be answered in Salazar’s testimony: First, whether the mural could cause damage to the existing masonry, and second, whether the mural would detract from the historic Mt. Vernon streetscape.

Testimony from Sherwin-Williams scientists was read, and community members came out both in support of and in opposition to the mural. A statement from John Waters was presented by an assistant. It read, in part: “I’m kind of mystified as to the controversy and hope today’s hearing is merely a technicality…I had read in the press that the neighborhood association is concerned that this well-intentioned mural would overwhelm the historic character of the neighborhood. It seems to me that the negative national news about the crime rate in Baltimore is much more apt to overwhelm our streets than Divine, and I know it’s a crazy world out there, but like it or not, Divine is historical now, and I think most of Mount Vernon is proud of Divine’s history here. What better development in neighborhood crime watch than Divine? Looking down beautifully over the passers by on Preston Street and keeping them safe.”

The committee found itself in a catch-22 of sorts in deciding whether the mural should stay or go. On one hand it was in violation of a rule stating that historic unpainted masonry should not be painted over. On the other, a second rule states that well-adhered paint should not be removed from historic walls to avoid the risk of damage to the structure. While the mural probably would not have been approved had it been brought in front of CHAP to begin with (a situation Salazar acknowledged and apologized for in his testimony), its existence on the wall means that CHAP would now have to break another rule to take it down.

While that may seem like a major loophole, city residents shouldn’t get any bright ideas about painting their own tributes on their historic homes. Salazar testified that he did not realize that works of art were in the same category as painting the exterior of a home only to change its color, and during the course of deliberation, Commissioner Larry Gibson presented the plan that would end the nearly hour-long discussion of what to do about Divine’s vivid visage.

“I think we should keep the mural, but for none of the reasons that I’ve heard up until now,” said Gibson. “I think the fundamental reason is, and this is a one-time thing, I accept the owner’s statement that they did not know—that somehow our rules with respect for murals are ambiguous or uncertain. There’s some distinction between just painting and changing color and an artistic work of art. But going forward, there should no longer be that ambiguity.”

Those looking to put up enormous works of art in their neighborhoods won’t get as lucky as Salazar and Williams have, it seems. “The press is here. Nobody in the future can tell us they didn’t know,” Gibson said, eliciting laughs from both the commission and those gathered to testify. “This is a one off.”

After several testimonies, much deliberation, and a few moments of confusion during the vote, the retroactive approval of the “I’m So Beautiful” mural on East Preston Street was unanimously passed, to applause and a couple of whoops from the crowd.

For the next couple of decades, at least until the paint begins to fade (“a topic for future commissions,” quipped CHAP chair Thomas Liebel), Divine’s arched eyebrows will continue to peek out from the alleyway overlooking a pair of dumpsters. It would be an odd location for nearly anyone else, but for the Queen of Filth, it feels just right.

No one better represents Baltimore’s fringe arts scene than living icon John Waters. From putting his hometown and its off-beat characters on the big screen in Hairspray to sparking the city’s affection for kitschy plastic flamingos and drag queen Divine in Pink Flamingos, his five-decade arts career continues to this day—and his eccentricity does, too.

On October 7, the Baltimore Museum of Art will unveil John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a retrospective of his work dating back to the 1990s, featuring more than 160 photos, video clips, early films, photocopied drawings, sculptures, and assorted ephemera (like archival photos of John with Andy Warhol and the framed Joan Miró reproduction he bought at the BMA Shop when he was a child). We asked him to reflect on some of his favorites from the upcoming salon-style exhibit.

You’ve lived in Baltimore all your life, you’ve been exhibiting in the U.S. and abroad for some 20 years—why are you just now doing this massive exhibit in your hometown?
I think it’s the right time for me to come home and have a show at the Baltimore Museum [of Art]. I couldn’t have the first one there because people would’ve just said, “Oh, that’s just because he lives in Baltimore.” I had to go out in the rest of the world and build 20 years of exhibitions and museum shows and books. Now that I’ve done that, I think Baltimore is the perfect homecoming. It’s where I got my first taste for the love of how art can infuriate people.

Baltimore is so prominent in all your films. It’s not obvious to a viewer whether it’s prominent in your visual art as well. Is it?
No. It’s the only thing I do that has very little to do with Baltimore. Not completely. My studio is there. My art assistants are there. I have a piece about Mr. Ray, who was one of the most notorious hairdo lunatics on the radio in Baltimore for decades, that I idolized—and he was horrified that I liked him [laughs].

What is it about Baltimore that’s kept you here?
Everything—the sense of humor and the extreme style. Everything I wrote about, everything that informed me was always about taking what some people think is a negative thing and exaggerating it, turning it into a style, and having a sense of humor about it. Baltimoreans have always done that. I like living there now more than I ever did because it’s the only place left that has a bohemia. It’s gotten more expensive, but it’s still cheaper than anywhere else. And kids can still live there and start, you know, bohemia! And the music scene there, the people who have had national success—they stayed. They bought houses. I think that’s very, very important, to stay in Baltimore.

You see that happening with the younger generations of artists?
Yes, I do. I see musicians and artists that grew up in Baltimore didn’t leave when they got success, and students that came here decided to stay. That’s all kind of new and good. You don’t have to leave Baltimore anymore to have success. You might have to have people outside of Baltimore like [your work], but you don’t have to leave.

So getting back to your exhibit—I understand that you take photos of TV screens and rearrange them to create a new narrative.
Yes, most of the work is like that. This show is really about editing. I take images from other people’s movies and put them in a completely different context, often with other movies and scenes, and tell a story that you read from left to write. So it’s about writing and editing.

All your career has been about that, right?
Yeah, you know, I write all my movies, I write all my books. I’ve never made a movie I didn’t write. This is just telling a story in a different way—in the art world rather than in a movie or onstage when I speak. It’s about telling a story and celebrating the failure of show business that really all the movie stills would be rejected from real publicity campaigns. They show what you can’t show.

I show the tape marks that the actors have to hit to stay in focus—but I don’t show the actors or costumes. I show things that go wrong like hair that gets stuck in the gate and ruins a scene. I just show everything that could go wrong and celebrate the failure of show business and the art world, hopefully in a humorous way, because I love everything I make fun.

Well and you’ve lived it—you’ve probably experienced firsthand pretty much everything that could go wrong on set.
Yes, I have, probably [laughs]. And I’ve experienced a lot that went right, too. And sometimes when something goes wrong, it is right in the arts world once it is isolated and put in a different completely showcase what is wrong is right. Like my commercially shot movies don’t work in the art world when I use them for imagery. The worst shot ones work the best.

So you’re using images from your movies as well other filmmakers’.
Once in a while, yes, but just one second of a movie—one second that proves no movies are bad. Because there’s 24 frames a second, and somehow you can find one frame out of 24 in a 90-minute movie that’s good.

Do you truly believe that no movie is bad?
I’m saying if you have access to every frame in a movie, no movie is all bad. You can find one great frame and celebrate it—out of context, stolen, isolated, hidden, put in the wrong projector, the wrong theater, the wrong book for the wrong audience, then it’s good.

I wanted to talk about this photograph called “Divine in Ecstasy.” What were you thinking when you captured that?
I was looking for a still that I didn’t have. I wanted that still. It’s the most ludicrous part of the film [Multiple Maniacs], where Divine is attacked and raped by a transgender man and an insane woman. It’s probably is the most sacrilegious scene to ever be filmed. I never had a still because we were always worried the police were gonna come and get us. We’d been arrested for making a movie before that, Mondo Trasho, so we’d jump out, do a scene, and run! So I just put an old VHS on the TV, and I just kept shooting like a crazed fan in the dark. And then I saw it and thought, oh God—this looks even artier than I could ever imagine. So that’s how I started doing this. Stills are what everyone remember from movies. I always knew how important they were. Even when I had no budget, I had stills.

Why is this photo considered your first official visual art piece?
I never say the word “art.” When people say to me, “I’m an artist,” I secretly think, “I’ll be the judge of that.” Someone else can call me an artist; I’m not calling myself an artist. I think that is up to others and history to call you an artist. But it was my first photograph that was ever shown in an art gallery.

Well, assuming what you’re exhibiting is art, do you see your work as pop art or conceptual art or what would you classify it as?
I think it is conceptual, if I had to name it. I think it all up before I do it. and then I have to go find the images to write with, to edit with, to make that concept come through. The whole idea behind the show is, can art be funny? It’s always been witty, but can it be funny? To me, it can be. But we’ll see.

John Picks His Favorites

Beverly Hills John. 2012. Rubell Family Collection, Miami. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

“I always say L.A. is just one big York Road. To me, eventually everyone is gonna look the same in L.A. There’s only so many kinds of faces you can get.”

Congratulations. 2014. Collection of Brenda Richardson. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery
“Congratulations is code. When your gallery calls you and says, ‘congratulations,’ you know that you sold something. When you’re a collector and you say, ‘I want it,’ the art dealer will say, ‘congratulations’—which to me is so ludicrous. Many galleries leave the price list out with red dots on [the pieces] when they’re sold. I told the story of the worst thing that can happen in the medium that is the best thing that can happen.”

Divine in Ecstasy. 1992. Collection of Amy and Zachary Lehman. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery
“I wanted that still. It’s the most ludicrous part of the film [Multiple Maniacs], where Divine is attacked and raped by a transgender man and an insane woman. So I just put an old VHS on the TV, and I just kept shooting like a crazed fan in the dark. And then I saw it and thought, oh God——this looks even artier than I could ever imagine. So that’s how I started doing this. It was my first photograph that was ever shown in an art gallery.”

Loser Gift Basket. 2006. Courtesy of the Artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. © John Waters
“I’m trying to imagine and celebrate everything that can go wrong in show business. Everybody used to give away gift baskets. If you went to the Oscars as a presenter, you’d get cars and stuff. You’d get amazing stuff. But then they started taxing you. It ruined—overnight—the gift bag business. This was my idea of what could be the worst gift basket if you lost the Oscars.”

“Believe it or not, Joe and I were co-workers at the Pizza Hut in Glen Burnie,” Cindy France says in a mini-documentary that’s part of the retrospective of former Baltimore photojournalist Joe Kohl’s work at the Maryland Historical Society. “Where you’d expect to meet an artist,” she adds ironically.

Kohl, who died in 2002 at the age of 44 from leukemia, earned a degree in fine arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and served on the staffs of The Baltimore News-American and Baltimore Business Journal. But it is his personal and freelance efforts for a diverse number of publications—including the City Paper, Afro-American, Village Voice, Easy Rider, Catholic Review, and Mid-Atlantic Gay Life—that set his work apart.

Outside his daily journalism beat, the prolific Kohl recorded Baltimore’s alternative culture, which coincided with his own social interests and curiosities, as the Maryland Historical notes in a statement accompanying the exhibition. Those included “the city’s erotic sub communities, small venue-rock concerts, and queer night life.”

“I don’t think he was really interested in who was the prettiest,” adds Donna Sherman, another friend of Kohl’s, in the short film. “I think he was interested in personality and [people] who had some kind of crazy thing going on with them that he would love to put on to film.” 

The mostly black and white images hung in the show, titled “Unscripted Moments: The Life & Photography of Joseph Kohl” are—as Sherman suggests—spontaneous and beautiful, but in a gritty, off-kilter, blue-collar Baltimore kind of way. They also feel like surprising material for a Maryland Historical Society exhibition, given their occasionally provocative nature and document the city’s underground scene, but also that the 1980s and 1990s are now considered historical.

Joe Tropea, Maryland Historical Society curator of films and photographs, describes Kohl’s shooting of early marches for AIDS funding, protests demanding divestment from apartheid South Africa, Baltimore bar and street scenes, John Waters and Divine on the red carpet outside the Senator Theatre, the world of sex workers, BDSM play, and the underground music scene as “a time capsule from the end of the last century.”

In other words, this is not the picture-perfect world of renowned former Baltimore Sun photographer A. Aubrey Bodine.

Tropea curated “Unscripted Moments” with Linda Day Clark, a professor of Fine Arts at Coppin State University, former City Paper photo editor and award-winning photojournalist J.M. Giordano, and Josh Sisk, an award-winning arts and culture photographer.

“What emerges,” Tropea says, “is a vision of Baltimore that’s open-hearted and raw, cosmopolitan and compassionate—and a portrait of a photographer who exposed his love for the city and all its variety in every shot.” 

Later, France says in a phone interview that the show was strange for her to look at when she first saw it. “I know a lot of those photographs,” the 54-year-old says with a laugh. “I was there.

France adds that she was “warned” about Kohl when she started at Pizza Hut, that fellow employees told her Kohl took pictures of everything and often asked people to pose nude for him. “You have to realize,” she says, “Joe was a teddy bear, but he was different. First, he was a big guy. And he wore these big, wire-rim glasses, had a longish, bowl hair cut, and giant muttonchops. Nobody had muttonchops then. It’s funny, too. He did ask a lot of people to pose nude for him, but never me.”

Although his illness came about unexpectedly and his life was cut short, Kohl left behind a substantial body of work—some 55,000 photographs now in the Maryland Historical Society collection.

“[Joe] called me one day and told me he was in the hospital and was in a pretty weakened state,” France says of her old friend. “I asked him if we wanted me to come by and he said, in his Joe way, ‘That’s why I’m calling, bitch.’

“I thought I’d better go,” she says. “I went that weekend and that was the last time I talked to him.”

This summer, the Baltimore Sun Media Group announced that it would be closing City Paper after 40 years. Since that announcement and subsequent layoffs, the alt-weekly’s downtown offices have become increasingly deserted, with empty cubicles and piles of old newspapers.

While the remaining editorial staff are hard at work on the last four issues, City Paper photographer and co-host of photojournalism podcast 10 Frames Per Second Joe Giordano is documenting his “last days in paper city” on Instagram, giving his followers a sense of what it’s like when a publication shutters.

“I’m not trying to flood my Instagram with depressing pictures,” he told Baltimore recently. “But I want to use well-crafted photos that show what’s going on now.” 

From photos of City Paper’s art director, Athena Towery, to a mini Divine perched upon an empty bookcase, Giordano promises to update his Instagram series until the release of the paper’s final issue on November 1. Here, he reflects on some of his favorites so far. 

“Athena has been at the paper for quite a while—since [the publication’s offices were on] Park Avenue. This photo really represents the bridge between the old City Paper and the new City Paper. I put Athena in front of the roller girls, one because of the composition, and two because she seemed to fit with that era of City Paper—’90s to the early 2000s.”

“Reggie came to us as an intern and he’s skyrocketed up there. . . . Those are his clips behind him. I’m immensely proud of everything that he’s done. He represents how I see the paper as mentoring young photographers and journalist—giving them the space they need to go on and do great things.”

“That was in our former ad exec’s office—he’d been there for maybe 20 years, I think. That’s old-school City Paper—it represents what City Paper is about. They’re in a pretty conservative building, so the fact that he has Divine, the boob, and the butt plug all on one shelf, it represents sticking your tongue out to the establishment. I couldn’t stop looking at this arrangement.”

“The crumpled American flag represents journalism right now. It’s a flag with corporate symbols on it instead of stars, if you look closely. Without getting too deep—with everything that’s going on in the country right now—this crumpled flag, discarded and thrown in the corner, caught my eye. It was just a very potent symbol for journalism.”