The surprising impact of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

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I've said it before, but It's still worth mentioning it again: my queer journey of self-discovery can pretty much be traced back to when I first watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show with my family on Halloween of 2014, when I was 15 years old. It might just be because I saw this movie at a very young and impressionable age, but it made an irreversibly deep impact on my life, and I can pretty much split my life into two halves at this point: before I watched Rocky Horror and was pretty much ignorant about anything queer, and after watching Rocky Horror when I became increasingly aware of both my own and other's queerness, as well. Now with all that said, re-watching the movie recently, it struck me just how much subversion was really going on in there that initially flew over my previously 15 year old head!! First, sexual fluidity is practically ubiquitous in the world of Rocky Horror!! Sadly, in the real world, awareness of sexually fluid identities like bisexual, pan-sexual and omni-sexual are still so new, and still so recent, that not everyone really understands and accepts multi-sexuality yet, and so we still haven't quite yet gotten over the past few centuries of social, political and cultural indoctrination that people can only ever either be gay or straight, and that you can only ever choose either one side or the other on the mono-sexual binary. Yet, it's precisely because of this depressing current reality that I find the Rocky Horror Picture Show so comforting, because this is a world where several of the movie's characters are easily and casually sexually fluid, and it's not just Frank, either. Eddie, Brad, Columbia, Magenta and Rocky are all portrayed as being sexually fluid throughout the movie, and it's just so deeply comforting and reassuring to me how at least in the world of Rocky Horror, sexual fluidity isn't treated as something that makes you suspicious for not being either completely gay or completely straight, but as something so casual and normal that it's not even worth worrying about and wasting your breath over. I realized only a few years after first watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show that my own sexuality was fluid, as well, and if it wasn't for watching Rocky Horror, I honestly don't even think I would have first realized that sexual fluidity was even a possibility. The other big thing about the Rocky Horror is just how attractive it makes gender fluidity look!! Sadly, cross dressing is almost never seen as attractive, and this seems to be only reinforced by media tropes that repeatedly portray cross-dressing as being either comical (a particular trope dating all the way back to 1959's Some Like it Hot) or creepy (a particular trope dating all the way back to 1960's Psycho). So what's so striking to me about the Rocky Horror Picture Show, compared to those two,famous aforementioned older portrayals of gender non-conformity, is just how attractive it makes gender fluidity and cross-dressing look, by comparison. Dr. Frank-n-Furter is certainly a villian, a fact of which we are immediately reminded of again just as he is about to be killed off during this film's own climactic denouement, but regardless of anything else he does, he is never portrayed as being specifically evil or undignified for cross-dressing and living as gender non-conforming, a writing choice which only makes this film even more radical in comparison to either Psycho, Some Like it Hot, or the numerous similar portrayals that seemingly spawned from either of these two movies in the following decades. By contrast, Frank is portrayed as being positively attractive for cross-dressing and gender non-conforming, and furthermore, this film's celebration of gender-fluidity is only cemented during the floor show scene. Even though this part of the movie has two previously hyper-masculine characters, Brad and Rocky, being forced to do drag, they are never made to look bad or stupid for deviating from gender norms. In fact, by contrast, they are celebrated as being just as hot and sexy for doing drag as Frank or either of the two girls they share the stage with, and to me, this just truly represents what's so beautiful about this movie. So much in the real world, thanks to centuries of cultural, social and political condition influenced by abrahamic religion, there's still this inherent idea that there's only males and females, and that if you deviate at all from the gender you were born from and what's expected from you, as a result, you're either bad or stupid for that, and this kinda thinking is just used to give so much hell to transgender, non-binary, gender-queer and even just gender non-conforming cis-gender people who are interested in cross-dressing. So by contrast, it's so beautiful to me that, at least in the world of Rocky Horror, cross-dressing, gender non-conformity, and gender fluidity aren't just normal, but cool and hot and attractive and worth celebrating and engaging in, too!! I don't think it's any exaggeration for me to say that watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show literally introduced me to cross-dressing back when I was 15, because I can still remember the shocked and surprised realization that I had when my mom was joking that I could cosplay as Dr. Frank-n-Furter and my 15 year old brain was just getting stuck and repeatedly going, "wait a minute, I can actually do that?! Really?!" I only got deeper into cross-dressing, after that, and from there, questioning my gender identity, as a whole, but this entire gender-questioning journey that I'm now on pretty much all started with watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and without Rocky Horror, I don't know if I ever would have have even realized that cross-dressing and gender non-conformity were actually paths that I could really go down and explore, period. Finally, of course, is the core message of sexual liberation that underpins the entire movie. While this isn't always conveyed well, Brad and Janet both get raped by Frank, after all, neither Brad nor Janet are ever specifically punished or penalized for exploring their sexualities outside of the confines of their marriage, either. In fact, Janet becomes happier and more confident for embracing her newfound sexuality, while Brad is mostly just portrayed as perpetually anxious and miserable for desperately trying to hold on to the social norms that he once knew. Simply put, the world of Rocky Horror is a world where centuries of religiously-imposed ideals of monogamy and cisheteronormativity hold little to no meaning, and this is all the more gloriously underlined when the film's iconic pool orgy scene is literally held over a floor reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting of God and Adam. This subversion of Religious norms, in fact, ties back into major theme in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, from sexual fluidity, to gender fluidity, and sexual liberation, all coming together to send one clear message: If you want to find yourself, and truly be happy about it, reject anything you ever thought was clearly right or wrong, male or female, gay or straight, especially if everything you ever thought you knew about life only ever came from the Church. This, I believe, is a huge key to why the Rocky Horror Picture Show is so iconic and beloved among the LGBTQ+ community, especially as religious zealots around the world continue to tell us that we're damned and going to hell for not conforming to either gender or sexual norms. After all, in a movie where the only happy straight(-ish) couple that comes out mostly unscathed is an incestuous romantic pairing of brother and sister, what do sexual and gender norms even mean, anymore?
So, those are all of my thoughts on why I think the Rocky Horror Picture Show is still so important to this day, 50 years after the original play first came out. It's not perfect, by any means, and there are definitely problematic elements to the movie that I've only very barely hinted at here, but given how many important things this movie got right, I didn't want to do yet another critique of how problematic the Rocky Horror Picture Show is, there's more than enough of those on the internet already, lol!! Of course it's not gonna be for everyone, anyways, but now I wanna reach out and ask anyone else who'd wanna answer: Have you ever watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and if so, what did you think of it?? Did watching the movie have any sort of impact on your life, at all??

^ Very difficult to read without proper sentence and paragraph structure.

I remember reading that it helped some people figure out their gender identity.

Still, the verbosity makes for a difficult read; but I will say this: The greatest impact that The Rocky Horror Picture Show had on me was how much fun I had as the understudy to the person who played Riff Raff in a late-1970s college production.