John Cameron Mitchell is a paradox: omnipresent but somehow still underground. You’ve seen in him in countless TV shows, from Girls to Shrill, and likely heard his name when he created the iconic title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but throughout his career, he has maintained a delightfully subversive queer edge.
Back in 2001, Hedwig’s film adaptation marked Mitchell’s directorial debut — a glamorously irrelevant calling card that was somewhat revoked after the release of his sophomore film Shortbus in 2006.
Based on the New York queer salons Mitchell would frequent — and now often hosts — Shortbus is a utopian vision of liberated sexuality that follows a group of free (or seeking-to-be-free) spirits who meet regularly at an underground Brooklyn orgy. Even by today’s standards, Shortbus is likely to be one of the top-to-bottom queerest films you’ve seen, with a decentralized, meandering narrative covering a broad spectrum of experiences across queer New York.
Oh, and it has sex. Lots and lots of unsimulated sex. Not only sex — but fucking, sucking, lovemaking, and everything in between. Of course, the Bush era came down hard on the film, with critics predictably pearl-clutching over its graphic depictions of sexuality instead of looking for meaning in its message about human connection in the Y2K era. Mitchell’s next film, 2010’s Rabbit Hole, was a tamer affair, but Shortbus has since been reclaimed as an underground classic, building a large enough following for a new 4K restoration, available January 26.
I, for one, am excited to see the film in high definition because the first time I watched it was on Pornhub.
“I’d heard Shortbus was on Pornhub; that cracks me up,” the eternally youthful Mitchell laughs when I admit this to him on a video call last October, shortly after the restoration premiered at NewFest for the film’s 15th anniversary. “Though I assumed we, as a civilization, would have advanced a little farther in terms of honoring sex as part of life, as opposed to belonging on a separate area, like Pornhub.”
The film’s overt sexuality was by design, and informed by Mitchell’s background.
“Growing up Catholic and queer, I was very aware that sex was terrible, and that gay sex was worse than anything, and connected to AIDS,” he says. “That was one of the reasons I wanted to investigate sex in a way that was more human, more humane, more funny, and more empathetic than I'd seen in art films, and certainly more than in porn.”
Not that Mitchell looks down on porn that’s done right, or feels authentic. “I’m a fan of porn,” he says. “Especially good porn where people are having a good time and not just imitating tropes. Porn can be as formulaic as any Marvel movie; you know what’s coming — literally.”
Still, Mitchell does have some concerns about what’s changed in the last 20 years. He tells me that “we’re in this situation now where young people are starting to let go of actual sex with actual people,” attributing the phenomenon to a combination of “the internet, and COVID, and a general fear of anything uncontrollable and messy in our lives.”
“People whack off behind a screen and think, ‘I don’t need a relationship, I’m whacking off online and then just hanging out with my friends,’” he wryly observes.
This growing disconnect between people, especially in the early years of the new millennium, is something Mitchell was hoping to challenge through Shortbus. The filmmaker says he probably best encapsulated this feeling in the film’s first scene, in which former sex worker James bursts into tears immediately after jerking off, alone, on camera.
“That, to me, is the strongest metaphor for how sad and lonely today’s digital culture is,” Mitchell says, and in the current OnlyFans landscape, the scene feels particularly relevant — a sign that Shortbus’ re-release could not be better timed.
“Sex feels a bit performative, lately,” Mitchell sighs. “We’re more puritanical than ever. I don't know if I could make Shortbus right now. In the past, there was resistance from the Christian Right: ‘How dare you have sex on film?’ Now, there's a bit more from the Left: ‘If someone's having sex on film, then someone’s being exploited!’”
At a time when a reliance on unsimulated sex was the hushed secret of the Internet’s wild west, comparisons to porn tanked the film’s credibility. Have the calls for sex-positive sensitivity felt oppressive for him as a creator, I ask?
“I think it can be,” he answers. “We’re in this awkward stage of trying to fix the past really fast, and change a way of thinking really fast. There are growing pains with that, and sometimes there’s overreach that comes from real places, but can get out of hand. So, for example, someone might say, ‘You’re a white cis man, how dare you film an Asian woman having an orgasm? That is inappropriate and not your story to tell.’ But all of the orgasms in Shortbus were from our actors wanting to do it. They were real.”
His tone is light but wise, befitting a man whose surface-level calm never betrays the transgressive, punk rock sluttiness at his core. “I'm all for artificiality — I’ve faked an orgasm, too,” he jokes, mentioning a moment during filming when he instructed an actor to just act out the orgasm so production could move along, only to be told, “Oh no, just give me a couple of minutes here.”
Behind the scenes, Mitchell says he made the actors’ comfort levels during shoots a priority. He estimates that about 90% of the actors were pre-existing couples. Compare that to the procedural world of intimacy counselors on modern-day film sets, and it’s clear Shortbus would face some logistical hurdles if it were being shot now. (“Could you imagine the hours they would have spent in the orgy room alone?” Mitchell jokes.)
“These actors wanted to go there, to remind us that sex is part of human expression,” he says. “It’s part of human drama and should be part of cinema. I always find it absurd when couples in movies kiss and then the film cuts to the morning, because that first time is a huge part of telling the story of two people meeting.”
Mitchell has spent a long span of the pandemic away from New York and its current sexual landscape, creating what he calls “little orphan houses,” where unhoused queer people could stay wherever he is working around the country (and in London). His eyes burst devilishly when I fill him in on the city’s post-lockdown uptick in PDA last summer.
“Has it? Well, good,” he smiles. “We shot the beginning of Shortbus in DUMBO — which is now for rich people — in a queer art collective called DUMBA, on the fringes of respectability. We saw the city change radically in the 2000s; the beginning of the end of a certain kind of New York. There are always going to be cool people in New York trying to do cool things, but real estate is destiny, and having the space to do the things you want to do is essential.”
The brief return of the public makeout session reminds Mitchell of the days after 9/11, and of the 2003 blackout featured in Shortbus, when New Yorkers experienced a similar burst of loosened sexuality. Nine months after 9/11, as Salon noted, local hospitals reported a 20% increase in births, and sex shop Toys in Babeland saw a boost in sales.
“It took a blackout, and terrorists, for New York to come together,” Mitchell remembers. “There was this beautiful, peaceful blackout where everyone treated each other with kindness, and even the cops let us drink in the streets, because everyone was just alive. And sex was part of that intercourse, so to speak — it was not something to be afraid of, rather something that could be celebrated.”
Brief New York hiatus aside, Mitchell is caught up on the culture, hanging out with Veneno creators Los Javis and soon to be starring as the infamous “Tiger King” in Peacock’s Joe vs. Carole. Shooting my shot, I ask if he’d ever sign off on a Hedwig cover album by Orville Peck.
“We’ve been DMing,” he says, somewhat coyly. “I wrote a song for [Joe vs. Carole] and sent it to Orville. We haven’t met yet, but we’ll see what he says.”
The 4K restoration of Shortbus is available from Oscilloscope on January 26. The re-release also includes limited theatrical showings.
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