#richard o brien no offense but you have some wild brain movements my guy

[halewitzka]

There are so many The Queers Were Good And The Straights Were Bad In Rocky Horror takes and I'm so ????

RHPS is good because none of these characters are good people! None! They're all incredibly interesting and it varies how much of a bad person the individual character is, but none of them are morally pure. They all do shit that you wouldn't approve of, the only character that is arguably innocent in the narrative is Rocky because he's got like 3 braincells to his name and has been plopped into a world that severely happens to him the entire time and that he can barely make sense of.

Like bro the siblings for sure aren’t the good guys, but what makes them bad is not the fact that theyre in a straight relationship. I mean theyre literally aliens, what do we know whether the concept of genders and/or heterosexuality is even a thing for them. You can't even apply straight to them in that sense.

But even if we disregard the alien bit and say okay, theyre in a straight, incestuous relationship - the fact that it's straight isn't morally condemning. Even the incest, which seems to not be normal or accepted within the transsylvanian culture either (going off of surrounding material that isn't in RHPS itself), is at least consensual. Compare and contrast with Frank, the beloved protagonist, setting out to rape 3 people over the course of a 90 minute movie.

Frank is a narcissist, and he is despicable for just about every single thing he does. Him being queer (again, technically alien logic so how queer in the human sense he really is is questionable but lets ignore that) doesn't make him a good person, in fact he's the worst person in the entire movie. But he's an excellent CHARACTER. He's fun to watch, and as a viewer you enjoy his presence immensely. You experience what it's like to get drawn in by him the same way he draws in the majority of the surrounding cast. But he's awful. He murders and rapes and has no regard for anyone but himself. No amount of queerness will save him from that.

Janet and Brad both have queer experiences during the movie, but does that make them queer? Brad's only sexual contact is with Frank, who may I remind you is assaulting him and then keeps going despite the fact that Brad never actually says yes to what's happening, he just ceases to put up resistance. He actively tells Frank to stop and Frank DOESN'T LISTEN. When Janet sees the aftermath of that encounter on the monitor, Frank looks very pleased with himself and Brad is off to the side, more clothed than he was when Frank came in, and seems to contemplate what just happened to him - and not in a good way.

Janet, while more enthusiastic about it, also has to get tricked into sex with Frank for it to happen in the first place and later goes on to have sex with Rocky. Granted, sex with Frank can in some shape or form always be interpreted as queer because of who Frank is, but he's mostly treated as a man by the narrative (I say mostly because there is that very telling part about him wanting to look like Fay Wray in Rose Tint My World, although he also expresses jealousy only over her clothing).

To get back to the point, Janet's only other explicitly queer contact is with Columbia, during Rose Tint My World - which seems to have all of them under the influence of some sort of spell/drug/alien pheromone??? Brad still is hesitant about what is happening during RTMW despite participating, so it's a bit unclear how much of their actions during the song are out of free will. I'm not saying that because I want to diminish the queer contact that does very much happen, I just think seeing it happen and deciding it's queer and therefore a good thing without further questioning isn't a good idea considering the context of the movie.

I personally like to think that Brad and Janet both realised something about themselves and their relationship with sex during the movie and took some of it with them post-castle. Maybe Janet actively allows herself to enjoy sex. Maybe she's had a bit of a bi awakening. Maybe Brad really did enjoy sex with a man and has to come to terms with it, or maybe he recognizes that it happened to him and he doesn't want that again. While I don't think that would’ve been a thought when the movie was made, Brad is also interpretable as realising he's not into sex at all and is coming to terms with that in a time where asexuality was not really part of the lgbtq vernacular yet

My point is, it's very difficult to assign "queer" or "straight" to most of these characters, and the same problem arises when trying to label them as "good" or "bad". They're complex, all of them, both in their morality and identity, and leave a lot of room for interpretation.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is amazing because it's telling a queer story without shying away from letting its characters be gross and unpolished and wrong. It's a story about people connecting with their sexuality as much as it is a story about a narcissist who gets whats coming to him at the hand of a servant he's neglected and abused. I could write a whole essay on how Riff Raff gets pushed to kill in the final act throughout the movie, and how Magenta doesn't seem to realise it up until it's too late. But this was about the fact that RHPS doesnt make it as easy as "queer vs straight" and "good vs bad" so I'm gonna shut up now