How does the cinematic and cultural environment that greeted Pink Flamingos compare to now?
We’re more jaded, but the powers that be are still Neuters. I made Pink Flamingos for the jaded hippie audience the year pornography became legal — 1972 was really the end of the ’60s. Basically after Woodstock, Altamont and all that, all the hippies had turned into drug addicts, and Deep Throat was released. That was a radical time too. It was a joke, really, to make a movie with a woman eating shit and doing all the things that, even to hippies, were not correct. Pink Flamingos was for angry hippies who later became punks. A Dirty Shame is the only time I’ve made a movie about sex. Before, you could never make it because of AIDS. I very radically believe that AIDS is not over; I know a lot of people who have AIDS. I was very conscious of the fact that you can’t get AIDS from any of the sex acts in this movie. I mean, I guess, radically, you can get it from cunnilingus without a dental dam. Nothing is a hundred percent, but I’m alive. I know my rules, and cunnilingus is not exactly my
