Items

• Shock value
  This first book from John Waters (1946-) is a memoir of his early filmmaking years from his childhood puppet shows to his 1977 feature film ‘Desperate Living’. As a gay man with a deep and abiding love for both low- and highbrow cinema, his films feature over-the-top LGBTQ+ characters (and actors) and set out to shake up the status quo and shock his audience. As Waters explains in the book’s introduction, “to me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about”. The memoir is illustrated with film stills and photographs of Waters and his friends and associates, including Divine (1945-1988), the actor and drag queen who featured in several Waters films.
• Street theater : the twenty-seventh of June, 1969, in two acts
  Part of the ‘JH Press Gay Play Script’ series, the play is set on Christopher Street on the eve of the police raids on the Stonewall Inn bar which led to the Stonewall Uprising, in which Doric Wilson (1939-2011) was a participant. The “street theater” of the title is created by the characters including a “flower child”, “street queens”, a “vice cop”, a “student radical” and a “politically incorrect lesbian”. First performed in 1982 in San Francisco, the play later moved to New York. Wilson also worked as a barman, the tips from which helped support his theatrical endeavours, including TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) an Off Off-Broadway theatre space.
• Torch song trilogy : three plays
  ‘Torch Song Trilogy’ has three acts titled ‘International Stud,’ ‘Fugue in a Nursery’ and ‘Widows and Children First!’ Each deals with a different phase in the life of Arnold Beckoff, a gay, Jewish drag queen and torch singer in 1970s and 1980s New York. Receiving criticism from some for upholding ‘family values’, for others, the trilogy’s exploration of gay marriage and adoption was radical during a time of conservative backlash. Harvey Fierstein (1954-) won a Tony Award for Best Play in 1983 as well as for Best Performance by a Leading Actor. First published in 1981 by the Gay Presses of New York, this edition was published in the UK to tie in with its West End premiere at Albery Theatre (now the Noël Coward Theatre) in 1985. Fierstein has since blazed a trail for queer representation on stage and screen.