10 great queer American underground films of the 1970s

In 1999, the secret was out. The director of Pink Narcissus (1971), that woozy, pastel-tinged queer cinema classic, was outed as James Bidgood. A costume designer, filmmaker and early beefcake photographer, Bidgood shot Pink Narcissus in the 1960s from his poky Hells Kitchen apartment, summoning the feverish fantasies of a midtown hustler from intricate miniatures and homespun special effects.

For years, the authorship of Pink Narcissus remained a mystery because of a messy falling out with Sherpix, the American indie and hardcore film distributor, over the final cut. Embroiled in legal battles and wanting to claw back their investment, Sherpix took over the edit, pushing Bidgood to take his name off the project in protest. But the film’s anonymous authorship only heightened the film’s mythical aura. Was it made by Kenneth Anger or Andy Warhol? Or did Jack Smith, director of that notorious underground classic Flaming Creatures (1963), have a hand in crafting those febrile erotic dreamscapes?

In his 1996 book Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars, film scholar Juan Suárez dates the historical underground film as spanning 1961 to 1966: from the midnight screenings at New York’s Charles Theatre, the first semi-regular showcase for underground film, to the commercial success of Warhol’s drug-fuelled epic Chelsea Girls. As a loose movement, underground cinema spurned the slickness and professionalism of big studio productions, operating outside of traditional modes of cinematic exhibition and distribution. Instead, it slinked through the margins of the film industry as it did ‘straight’ society. 

Boasting often deliberately amateurish aesthetics and transgressive subject matter, underground cinema was fired up by a desire to shock, titillate and disrupt the status quo. But if the 1960s was the underground film’s high period, a queer underground sensibility can still be detected through to the fag-end of American 1970s cinema, even as the underground’s audiences and exhibition channels transformed beyond recognition.

Though shot when the underground film was at its peak, by the time Pink Narcissus came out in 1971, the landscape had changed completely. Post Stonewall but pre AIDS crisis, the underground movie went from the margins to the mainstream, becoming hot property thanks to the ‘midnight movie’ boom of highly communal and ritualistic screenings. In this environment, queer cinema played to raucous and appreciative audiences, busting taboos alongside preconceived notions of ‘good’ taste. 

Director: John Waters

Heavily influenced by the films of Warhol and George and Mike Kuchar, John Waters was one of the central figures responsible for bringing underground aesthetics into arthouse movie theatres. Dubbed his “celluloid atrocity”, Multiple Maniacs was only his second feature but his first with sync sound. This rough and unpolished gem stars Divine as the overbearing mistress of a travelling freak show called Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions. Making a mockery of middle-class voyeurism, while inadvertently pre-empting much of its future audiences, Multiple Maniacs cycles through scandalous spectacles of puke-eating, heroin comedowns, sex orgies and parodic displays of “actual queers kissing”. 

The film’s infamous sex scene was shot in a church after Waters befriended a liberal priest. It would premiere at the First Unitarian Church in Baltimore where Waters – ever the showman – drew inspiration from the promotional gimmicks of B-movie impresario William Castle, giving early audiences a pound of raw meat on entry. “Multiple Maniacs really helped me to flush Catholicism out of my system,” Waters would write in his memoir Shock Value. Blasphemy, murder, rape, cannibalism: Waters’ film showed that truly nothing was out of bounds. 

Director: Paul Morrissey

Part of a trilogy sandwiched sweatily between Flesh (1968) and Heat (1972), Trash is arguably the apex of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol’s filmic collaborations. A satirical melodrama of sexual and creative impotence, Trash features underground film stars Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn as a down-and-out junky couple in this claustrophobic New York slice-of-life drama. 

A recurring muse of the trilogy, the queer and stoner sex-symbol Dallesandro first appeared in Warhol’s Four Stars (1967), after passing by the Factory on the way to score drugs. His vacant detachment, aided by Morrissey’s minimalist long takes and pore-revealing close-ups, give the film an abject authenticity that is set off further by Woodlawn’s highly-strung theatrics of sexual frustration. Hinging on the performers’ stark and unforgiving presentations of self, Trash picks through the detritus of a life lived at the edges, salvaging moments of potential from the rubble.

Director: Steven Arnold

The first and only feature by Bay Area visual artist Steven Arnold, Luminous Procuress unfolds as a sequined saturnalia of visual and erotic excess. This legendary underground film was shot in San Francisco’s Mission district with the hippie drag troupe the Cockettes, known at the time for their outrageous, gender-fluid performances; Luminous Procuress also starred the blue-haired beat poet ruth weiss, thereby linking the post-war beat and later hippie subcultures into a single anarchic whole.

A thrift-store chimera of queer self-fashioning, Luminous Procuress transforms an art deco house into a dream space of quasi-religious initiation, as two young hippies engage in a journey of transformation lorded over by the beehived goddess Pandora, the eponymous ‘Procuress’. With its interest in ritual, myth and religiosity, it’s no wonder that queer underground cinema played well on the late-night circuit. In their 1983 book Midnight Movies, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum compared the midnight screening phenomenon to the Catholic ritual of midnight mass; the former being a profane inversion of the latter. 

It wasn’t just the timing (and imbibing) that helped: the midnight movie was a powerful generator of community at a particular historical juncture in the Gay Liberation movement. Arnold, too, was a pioneer of midnight movie programming, having started a series of late-night film screenings at the Palace Theatre, a decaying Chinese movie house in North Beach. Later billed as the Nocturnal Dream Shows, these drug-fuelled, chaotic screenings brought together experimental and classic movies with monthly performances by the Cockettes. Arnold would screen Multiple Maniacs alongside a Bugs Bunny animated classic and George Kuchar’s Pagan Rhapsody (1970), because of course. 

Director: Paul Morrissey

An underappreciated classic of trans cinema, Women in Revolt! is Paul Morrissey’s caustic send-up of militant feminism and ‘radical chic’, the latter a term memorably coined by Tom Wolfe in a 1970 article about wealthy liberal poseurs at a Leonard Bernstein party. Acerbic underground film legends Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn play violent, man-hating anarchists who eventually form a feminist organisation known as Politically Involved Girls (PIG). 

Shot on the hoof in a scuzzy-looking New York City on the slow ascent towards gentrification, Women in Revolt! was made in the wake of radical feminist Valerie Solanis’s near-fatal shooting of Warhol in 1968. As such, the feminist organisation can be read as a tongue-in-cheek nod to Solanis’s own Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM), which came with an accompanying manifesto calling to “eliminate the male sex”. Deeply sensationalist, delightfully silly and actively un-PC, Women in Revolt! throws a home-made firebomb at liberal political posturing.

Director: Robert J. Kaplan

One of the first features with a trans lead, the madcap comedy musical Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers starred chameleonic Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn as a wide-eyed girl and wannabe actress looking to make it in the big city. Her character, Eve Harrington, leaves her suburban Kansas upbringing for the bright lights of the Big Apple, hoping to survive in the process. 

Kaplan’s breezy comedy showcased the star at the height of her powers, while featuring cameos from Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler (could things get any gayer?). Fresh off the Morrissey/Warhol productions, Woodlawn was immortalised that year in Lou Reed’s track ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, as the hitchhiker who “plucked her eyebrows on the way / shaved her legs and then he was a she”. It’s a joyful caper that is more indebted to MGM musicals, Busby Berkeley choreography and 1930s screwball comedies than the Warholian drug-fug of Woodlawn’s previous roles. Director Robert J. Kaplan injects camp theatrics and riotous silliness into an otherwise familiar narrative. Believed lost, having faded into obscurity, the film was retrieved and restored by the Academy Film Archive.

Director: John Waters

From his earliest ultra-low-budget shorts, such as Roman Candles (1967), Baltimore native John Waters worked with a recurring cast of local friends that became known as his Dreamlanders. Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller and many others formed the stronghold of Waters’ degenerate acting troupe, casting an alternate spin on the Hollywood star system much as Warhol had done with his Factory. Pink Flamingos was the film that made him notorious, mostly for its headline-grabbing scene of coprophagia. Like so many of Waters’ underground productions, it poked fun at the peace-and-love posturing of the hippie movement to uncover its rotten edifice, and drew on Waters’ deeply studious obsession with the Manson Family murders. 

Divine plays Babs Johnson, otherwise known as “the filthiest person alive”. Babs lives in a caravan park with her hippie son Crackers and Mama Edie until war breaks out with a disturbed couple known for selling heroin to school children and impregnating hitchhikers to sell the babies to lesbian couples. “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation,” Waters wrote in his memoir, and reports suggest that several audience responses were Cannes-worthy. A couple of years later, Waters made Female Trouble (1974), the film that marked his full-time departure from the underground, when it was picked up by New Line for distribution.

Director: Michael Kalmen

Written and directed by the underground artist Michael J. Kalmen, the wonderfully titled Elevator Girls in Bondage was another vehicle for West Coast drag troupe the Cockettes. Founding Cockette member Rumi Missabu plays a Marxist elevator girl called Maxine. Kalmen’s campy story about underpaid trans and drag workers who rise up in revolt against the crummy working conditions of a sleazy San Francisco hotel seemed to strike a cord with audiences looking for sympathetic send-ups of the worker’s struggle.

Rumi later observed: “I was paid very handsomely to make my film Elevator Girls in Bondage. I was paid in cash. The funding came from illicit drugs. Not from the sale of drugs but from the actual manufacturing of drugs – the making of angel dust. Biker gangs sold it. I was in on the actual production at one point. It was so scary. I could have blown up in the lab. I don’t want to mention names, but the real person running the operation to raise money for the film was doing it from San Quentin State Prison.”

Director: Doris Wishman

A comic satire of the adult film industry, Double Agent 73 is a typically offbeat underground sexploitation film from the ever-prolific grindhouse director, producer and distributor Doris Wishman. The film was a vehicle for the Amazonian performer Chesty Morgan, an exotic dancer and resolute icon of exploitation cinema, marking Wishman’s second collaboration with the star after Deadly Weapons (1974). You might, understandably, wonder what those weapons are. The record-busting 73-inch bust measurement of Chesty’s architectonic bazoombas were, in Wishman’s earlier offering, a powerful murder weapon, but in Double Agent 73 they acquired a more technological purpose. A mini camera snuck into Chesty’s cleavage becomes a ticking time-bomb for undercover espionage. 

Come for the garish interiors and far-out fashions – Chesty’s outrageous outfits, all skyscraper platform heels and minge-skimming mini skirts, deserve a special mention – but stay for the cheerily resourceful filmmaking. The reigning queen of DIY cinematography and low-budget, campily artful tricks, Wishman knew how to craft magic (and madness) out of very limited resources.

Director: George Kuchar

Memorably hailed by Steve Said as ‘dime-store von Sternberg’, The Devil’s Cleavage extends George Kuchar’s career-long fascination with the overwrought theatrics of Hollywood melodrama into a serpentine descent into American backwaters. One of very few feature-length films that George Kuchar made in his lifetime, the film was made with several of his students at the San Francisco Art Institute. A raging runaway nurse called Ginger (played by a snarling Ainslie Pryor) escapes her miserable marriage by taking to the road – armed with a jar of fake vomit, of course. Headed for the utopian promise of Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma, she encounters an outlandish cast of characters on her escape quest, including a dubious hotel clerk played by Kuchar’s collaborator and on-off lover Curt McDowell. Other bit parts were played by figures from the American underground comix scene, including Bill Griffith (of Zippy the Pinhead fame) and Art Spiegelman, later known for his award-winning graphic novel Maus. 

Injecting camp anarchy and caustic wit into swoon-worthy scenes of Sirkian homage, The Devil’s Cleavage does what many of Kuchar’s films do, which is to veer tonally between pastiche and praise, humour and deep seriousness. The rundown motels, tacky trinkets and kitsch ornaments are not entirely up for ironic critique; what emerges instead is a celebration of the unloved and the discarded. What comes through the strongest, however, is the love that Kuchar has for the magic of the movies.

Director: Curt McDowell

A notorious hit on the midnight movie circuit, Curt McDowell’s outrageous hardcore horror draws together a slew of references as broad as its comedy. Splicing together hardcore pornography with avant-garde experimentalism, and Hollywood melodrama with sexploitation comedy, Thundercrack! papers the cracks with its goofy, good-time performances. 

Written by George Kuchar, the absurdist dialogue was explicitly couched in the style of Tennessee Williams, and cycles through surreal scenes featuring gorilla costumes, cucumbers, group sex and fellatio. Animated by haunted-house jump scares and deliciously outré drama, this extremely low-budget feature would screen regularly at London’s Scala cinema, becoming synonymous with the ‘cinema of sin’. Legend has it that the Scala only had one print of Thundercrack!, which they played until it wore out completely. Rising rents and an upsurge in the popularity of home video would, among other factors, spell the end of the midnight movie boom, though a new generation is calling for its revival.

The 4K restoration of Pink Narcissus is in cinemas and on BFI Player and BFI Blu-ray now.