Desperate Living: Mortville in Revolt

The camaraderie of Mortville echoes that of Waters’ own Dreamlanders, a troupe that included Desperate Living cast members Stole, Hill, Massey, Lowe, Pearce, Stover, and Cookie Mueller (who plays a Mortville resident), in addition to Divine and others. Waters, like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini before him, regularly employed the same actors over and over. Friendship was a powerful force for these outcasts, who transmuted their pain into stardom, just as it is for Grizelda and Peggy, who become “sisters in crime,” if only for a while. Years after making films like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble (1974), and Polyester (1981), Waters reflected on the grief he felt over the sheer number of his collaborators who had passed away prematurely: “I miss everybody. You go through the movies, and you see them. God, we were so young. Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.”

In recent years, Waters has found acceptance in the mainstream, a development that he maintains a benign attitude about. It’s not as if his many accolades—from a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to multiple Grammy nominations to numerous retrospectives around the world—have made it any easier for him to make films. (David Lynch, too, had difficulty getting funding in his later years.) “The only difference is that now people are celebrating these kinds of films. When I started out, the first festival I entered, they stopped my movie halfway through,” Waters has joked with deadpan seriousness. Deviants and degenerates sell, sure, but not enough to outweigh the cultural conservatism of our current moment.

“You’re a weirdo pervert!” Muffy screams at Mole when she discovers he got phalloplasty in order to better serve her needs, about two-thirds of the way through Desperate Living. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Mole cuts off his new dick and Muffy throws it outside, where a dog promptly eats the appendage. In an essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, Caden Mark Gardner crowns Mole a “gender outlaw” in the anarchic style of the legendary Kate Bornstein, someone who lives outside the traditional trans-at-birth narrative and moves through the world more ambiguously. It’s not exactly that Mole is ambivalent about his masculinity—“I’m a man!” he screeches—but that he seems to have an awareness of the times, understanding that he’s being read as a butch lesbian. Despite this gender trouble, when Muffy pukes after trying to take his dick out on its maiden voyage, he swiftly severs his phallus. “So much for science, Muffy,” he moans.

The link between John Waters and trans medicine is more than satirical coincidence. Baltimore is home to what was one of the first hubs of gender-affirming surgical care: Johns Hopkins University. Desperate Living features a sequence where Mole holds the staff there at gunpoint in order to speedrun getting phallo. Only two years after the film came out, however, the clinic shut down because of conservative backlash. Perhaps this sounds familiar, given the recent closures of numerous pediatric trans clinics, and threats to trans medicine more broadly. Déjà vu. “America has finally come to resemble one of Waters’ movies,” Alex Halberstadt recently wrote in the New York Times.

Especially in his early features—made during, and in the shadow of, Richard Nixon’s presidency—Waters took ruthless aim at censorship, bourgeois norms, and other repressive regimes. For the provocative Pink Flamingos, he filmed a decked-out Divine walking down the street in real time, capturing the actual looks of disgust and bewilderment from passersby. (Fashion is always a key component in Waters’ films; he adores a sequin dress.) The fear of suburban housewives, something my fellow trannies are all too familiar with, is a motif he would return to again and again.

As for phalloplasty, it remains a rare and controversial surgery. In 2022, the New York Times published an in-depth feature by Jamie Lauren Keiles titled “How Ben Got His Penis.” As he outlines the long road of medical transition—and the many frightful aspects of such a difficult surgery—Keiles delivers a nice summation of the process: “Phalloplasty, or surgery to construct a penis, is one of medicine’s most complex procedures. Though it technically refers to one step in a long process—the construction of a phallus from a flap of one’s own skin—the term is used more generally to describe a suite of modular surgeries, each attending to a different penile function.”

Mole’s cock is not quite this advanced. It looks not unlike a floppy hot dog sewn on by the film’s costume department. Displeasure at the surgery, like Muffy’s, is not uncommon; I know many people who joke about “Frankendick,” worried about the possible complications of the procedure. One study that collated data from 2009 to 2019 found that only 766 patients had undergone phalloplasty in the state of California during that time. Part of the reason is that, unlike vaginoplasty, phalloplasty is not a one-and-done procedure—it requires multiple visits to the doctor, often over the course of several years. It’s a Herculean commitment to gender that Desperate Living transforms into a utopian drive-by event.

The debates over trans surgery can easily lend themselves to melodrama. Thank God that Waters didn’t bow down to sentimental portrayals of trans plight. Early trans pioneer and frequent Waters collaborator Elizabeth Coffey—who briefly appears in Desperate Living as a bartender in the middle of a bar brawl—also shows up in Pink Flamingos, where she flashes her dick. Apparently, she filmed the cameo just days before getting vaginoplasty—at Johns Hopkins, no less. According to Waters, “She said, ‘I did that scene because I knew that I could own that joke forever. And nobody could ever make fun of me.’ And no one ever did.” It’s a strategy Coffey may have learned from Waters: his ability to turn filth into gold by owning it. Desperate Living takes a similar approach to gender, refusing respectability in favor of jesters and pure abjection. Mole isn’t some trans-boy paragon of virtue—in his quest to topple Queen Carlotta, he’s just as despicable as any of Waters’ cissies.