I Wish I Gave a Sh*t The Night John Waters Gave Me Poop
I just stared at his mustache.
Credit: XAVIER SCHIPANI
Since the cult filmmaker and legendary aesthete John Waters comes through Seattle every year, and since I worked for an alternative newsweekly in Seattle called The Stranger for six years, I wrote about Waters at least six times while editing for the paper. One year, his people gave me his phone number and let me call him to talk about Melania’s Christmas decorations at the White House and how Antifa should be sexier (enter: Hasan Piker). But the first time I met John Waters was also the first time I ever wore drag, and I tell the story below, originally printed in The Stranger’s annual Queer Issue for Pride 2018. I feel very fortunate to have met Waters at 17 in Traverse City, Michigan, and again at 20 when I worked at The Walker in Minneapolis, where he had an art show. His early work has an obvious hold on me — it’s hard to beat a drag queen shooting her audience after jumping on a trampoline — but his movie that’s on my mind the most lately is Polyester, an ode to the enduring power of plastic, or at least that’s how I think of it.
Here’s the story of the first time I met the king of filth.
Chase Burns Broderick
Thursday, May 14, 2026
The ending of Female Trouble (1974):📚 Originally published in The Stranger’s 2018 Pride Issue (June 2018)
🤡 Written by Chase Burns Broderick
“You’re gonna love this,” he said, as he handed me a suspiciously hot-pink bag.
He didn’t know who I was, and all I knew about him was that he was a celebrity — the first gay celebrity I’d ever met — and he had an impossibly thin, maybe Sharpied-in, mustache. I kept staring at it. Was that really his hair?
“Thanks,” I said politely, taking the bag.
I knew his name was John Waters, and I knew he was famous, but honestly I didn’t know any more than that and I didn’t really give a shit. I was 17.
He gestured for me to open it.
“Wow,” I said, confused, once I’d opened the bag, because inside of the bag was a piece of poop.
On first glance, I thought it was a small brown piece of real shit.
A second later I realized it was plastic.
He stood there smiling, waiting for me to get a joke I didn’t get. I’d just performed in a drag show for him — he and filmmaker Michael Moore (the guy behind Bowling for Columbine for a certain generation and the guy behind the Olivia-Wilde-nodding meme for another generation) were the judges — although “drag show” is a generous term for what had happened. Only five divas showed up to perform for an empty theater. It was 2010 and we were in conservative Michigan country. I lost to a retired queen who deepthroated the mic. The plastic poop was my consolation prize for coming in second.
I was too polite or too stunned to ask him to explain it. I was embarrassed. Was my performance really that shitty? I nodded and left the stage.
The whole night had been weird and it was really Michael Moore’s fault.
Moore, the famous filmmaker behind Fahrenheit 9/11, was known for bringing strange things to northern Michigan. He created a film festival in Traverse City in 2005, bringing freaks and liberals to an otherwise conservative-leaning purple area. Now, in 2010, he’d decided to expand with a high-profile comedy and arts festival in Traverse City in the middle of February, northern Michigan’s worst month.
The resort town is at the very tip of Michigan’s mitt, and home to a famous cherry festival, Moore’s film festival, and an arts boarding school, where I was a prisoner/student (Editor’s Note: See this homepage, where I am photographed reading Shakespeare in Jeffrey Epstein’s cabin. More to come. Haha.). There is nothing going on in this part of the world during the middle of winter. Snowdrifts sometimes get as high as 15 feet — three times the height of most people. Everyone hides. I once found a girl’s braid inside a snowdrift, and that was the most exciting thing to ever happen to me during a Michigan winter.
My friends and I were intrigued by what Moore was up to. We were bored with Adderall and bad handjobs, and an arts festival organized by the rebel documentarian was a valid excuse to leave our boarding school campus. We convinced our hall monitors that we were very into comedy and they let us go off-campus unsupervised. I felt so cool.
Headlining Moore’s inaugural season were Roseanne Barr and John Waters, two one-of-a-kind Americans. Moore, a fiery leftist and longtime friend of Roseanne Barr, told Traverse magazine that year that “there is no better observer of the state of the affairs we’re in than Roseanne.” (He’s since distanced himself from Barr, recently calling her a “damaged soul” and an “outright hateful and racist person.”) We all knew who Roseanne was because of her TV show, and Roseanne’s events sold out quickly. None of us knew who John Waters was. I was born in 1992, 20 years after Pink Flamingos came out.
Waters was slated to perform his one-man show “This Filthy World,” but that was on a school night and we couldn’t get a pass. One of my friends noticed that he and Moore were hosting a late-night drag show and a screening of a movie starring “the filthiest person alive.” We wanted something cool to post on Facebook, so we chose that.
A straight guy I wanted to blow thought it would be funny if one of us competed. So I did.
“Thanks,” I told Waters, as I walked away with the shit and sat back down in the audience next to the bratty straight friends I’d dragged to the theater with me. “What’s in the bag?” one asked.
“Plastic poop?”
They looked at me blankly.
“I guess it’s a poop joke cuz I was a piece of shit.”
I couldn’t fathom this shit’s importance, let alone how lucky I was to be holding America’s filthiest filmmaker’s turd.
I told the hot straight drummer I’d come with, the one I wanted to suck bone dry, that Waters was creepy. The drummer shrugged, then Pink Flamingos started and my life changed.
The film starts out with Edith Massey, a fully grown adult woman, sitting in a baby pen. She’s yelling for the O.G. beauty Divine to get her some eggs. Massey wears lingerie and holds a giant stuffed plush heart. She’s in a full face of makeup but it’s allegedly the crack of dawn. Divine, a monster in a dress, struts in and hardly says “I’m sure you’re HUNGRY, Mama,” before the film cuts to two rival perverts who announce they’re competing with Divine to be the filthiest person alive.
It’s, to be polite, fucking nonsense.
“This acting is so BAAAAAD. It’s terrible,” one of my straight friends whined. I agreed.
Everything only got worse. A flasher makes money in the movie by wagging his wrinkly dick — with turkey necks and sausages tied to it — at women. While they scream, he steals their purses. He’s only bested by a trans woman who flashes her dick, tits, and scrotum, which causes him to flee. Sometime after that, a straight couple has sex on screen while smashing a real live chicken between their bodies until it dies between them. Dies. And this is why PETA has problems with Waters.
“I have to pee,” my friend next to me said, after the chicken scene, and left the theater for a lot longer than a piss.
Alone, I watched more of the madness. It was horrible.
And yet.
In the film, Divine has a birthday. She gets poppers and lice shampoo and a pig’s head. She and all her friends do drugs, then a performer flexes his prolapsed anus to “Surfin’ Bird” — in rhythm. The police come, but Divine kills them with a meat cleaver. She eats them. Everyone, even the murdered, seems like they’re having fun. Things are burned! Blowjobs are given! Penises are cut off! People are convicted of “assholism”! And finally, after more murder, Divine finishes the rampage by finding a little dog, watching it shit, and then eating it. It is the grossest moment in all of film.
It also explained the fake poop.
Sitting alone, I thought about how drag — and, to a greater extent, my life — could be filthier. I thought it was radical just to put on my friend’s mom’s sparkly skirt. I didn’t realize I could’ve shown up covered in shit and still made people proud. Self, it turns out, could be thrown away and pissed on and recombobulated to my liking.
Divine smiles, face full of shit.
I’m sorry, but I threw away the plastic poop. I don’t like poop, despite what people have said.
