Punk Rock Star of Stage and Screen

At Q&As and talk-backs following the recent round of Shortbus screenings, Mitchell has found himself taken to task by those who don’t see themselves represented or who interpret the onscreen sex as exploitative rather than freeing. “The same night that someone said, ‘Is it your right to talk about an Asian woman having an orgasm?’—a central plot point of the movie—someone else said, ‘Have you thought of remaking Hedwig with a more diverse cast?’” Mitchell says. “It’s impossible to discuss this stuff.” There are still those who revere Mitchell and his work, but the criticism clearly prickles him. “A lot of young people are kind of annoying to me right now,” he tells me. “A little naggy, telling you what you can and can’t do. Sometimes, you know, for good reason, but it does make me feel weirdly old.”

There are now a couple of generations that came of age watching Hedwig and Shortbus and mining them for possibilities. Riverdale did a full Hedwig episode; the Bushwick queer club 3 Dollar Bill is hosting “HED!,” a tribute to the show, in March.

For Mitchell’s devotees, the censoriousness is puzzling. Javier Calvo, one half of Los Javis, the Spanish writing-directing duo behind last year’s hit series Veneno, bought a DVD of Hedwig on eBay as a teenager and was “completely blown away,” he said via email. “Everything about it was life-changing for me.” It was a major reference point for La Llamada, the musical he made with Javier Ambrossi, which, like Hedwig, grew into a feature film. They described Mitchell, whom they eventually met and befriended, as their “gay guru.” The comedian and writer Joel Kim Booster, who played Mitchell’s husband on Shrill, also called him a major influence. He found Shortbus in college while working at a summer theater where it was one of only two DVDs on hand (the other was Wet Hot American Summer). “Those two movies shaped me and my sensibility more than anything else I can remember,” Booster told me. “I didn’t know you could do things like this.” He came back to school and changed his major from musical theater to playwriting. Fire Island, his debut feature, comes out this June.

And yet when he tweeted about Shortbus recently, Booster recalled, “I had a few people, like, slide into my DMs and be like, ‘You know, that movie is not okay.’ Agency, I think, is the big buzzword that slips in when I have conversations with people who think Shortbus is not something we should be celebrating anymore. It’s not a criticism that I really agree with, quite honestly. I just think it’s interesting to hear people really not be able to articulate necessarily what makes the movie wrong.”

“Somebody had said during a Q&A, ‘Who are you to tell the Asian woman’s story?’ with the assumption that that’s not my story,” said Sook-Yin Lee, who overcame the objections of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, her employer at the time, to play Sofia, one of the main characters. “I created the character. That is my story.”

In some ways, the culture has finally caught up with Mitchell. “Hedwig would never, couldn’t have been on Broadway back then,” he says. At the outset, even New York’s more independent-minded downtown theaters, like New York Theatre Workshop and the Public, turned it down, he says. By 2014, that was no longer true: That year, Hedwig opened on Broadway to acclaim, winning Tonys for Neil Patrick Harris (as Hedwig) and Lena Hall (as Yitzhak). Mitchell, who did a few performances—older, wiser, and occasionally in a knee brace after injuring himself doing the choreography—won a special Tony for it the following year. In 2019, the film version, which never recouped its $6 million budget, was enshrined in the Criterion Collection.

But in other ways, as the diversity complaints and sensitivity checks make clear, the culture has moved past Mitchell. Recent roles have cast him as a gay contrarian: art typecasting life. On Shrill, he plays a character based on Dan Savage, needling the plus-size protagonist about the obesity epidemic; on The Good Fight, he’s an elder, but no less morally stunted, version of Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing gay troll. In 2019, he went on the dirtbag-left podcast Chapo Trap House. “You’ve avoided being called out in the way that Dan Savage has been called out or RuPaul has been called out,” noted one of the hosts. “I’m sure there will be some point—maybe it’s something in this podcast—that will offend,” Mitchell replied.

“I come out of Borscht Belt humor; I come out of queer humor, drag; I come out of rock and roll; and I come from Broadway,” he says. “All of those tools are really useful for making art but also for making protest art. And nowadays, a lot of those tools are considered a little bit déclassé or old-fashioned or perhaps even uncool.” He acknowledges that the new sensitivity came in many cases as a necessary corrective, even while admitting that “the oppression Olympics can get on my nerves”: “I want to remind people that it is how you say it, not what you say. You know, you can call someone a ‘faggot.’ I don’t believe in canceling the F-word. I don’t believe in canceling the N-word.” Whether the criticisms of him are entirely in good faith, whether they’re reasonable, is open to debate. What isn’t is that the debate is no longer on his terms.

Mitchell isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but he has grown a bit cranky at being expected to watch what he says. Cranky, but also careful. (He says he loves telling ethnic jokes because he could be canceled, though he figures he’s too old to be, yet he makes it very clear he doesn’t consider himself a victim of his increasingly insistent critics.) “We’re in Wokeland now, so everyone’s on notice,” he says. “There is a bit of a cultural revolution. The kids-haveguns cult.” He dreams of a more peaceful revolution, an incremental revolution. He has been steeping himself in the anarchism of thinkers like Murray Bookchin, the Trotskyite libertarian socialist; he describes himself as a “radical, incremental, anarchist centrist.” New York, Mitchell says, can be “a little constricting.”

Thus New Orleans. The vibe is a little bit looser down here; there’s still “midget policing,” as he puts it, “but it melts more here. It’s hot.” Friends have been coming down and collaborators—all week, he has been working with Michael Cavadias, another veteran of the alt-drag scene, on what will be a podcast, a medium that appeals for its lower budgets and lower barriers to entry. Mitchell’s most recent undertaking was Anthem: Homunculus, a narrative podcast that was a spiritual successor to Hedwig, with music by Bryan Weller and an all-star cast that included Glenn Close, Patti LuPone, and Cynthia Erivo; his next is The Laundronauts, a podcast for kids that he made in collaboration with his younger brother Colin. “If I never make another film, that wouldn’t kill me,” Mitchell says. “People aren’t watching them, and they aren’t financing them. Shortbus I really could not make today for various reasons, distribution as well as wokeness.” Meanwhile, to pay the bills, he’s still acting. After Joe vs. Carole, there’s Netflix’s The Sandman, in which he plays a drag-club owner with a penchant for Gypsy. More, he hopes, will follow. After any given success, he knows “you get a couple of weeks of heat, which is irrational exuberance,” he says. “And then it goes away.”

That’s why, in part, he likes making his own creative communities with him

self as the mother and father figure. He did it through all his time in New York— Shortbus was named after an underground dance party he threw, and since 2008, he has thrown Mattachine, a monthly party aimed at bringing that same spirit to New York’s oldest gay bar, Julius’ in the Village, which had gone to seed and hustlerdom but he and his friends helped to revive. And he hopes to do it again in New Orleans, staging shows in his bloody ballroom, engaging with his fellow artists, connecting. All his work, from Hedwig to Shortbus to Anthem,

is obsessed with the possibility of forging connection and finding community. Even Joe Exotic, head of a harem of husbands and a cabal of like-minded zookeepers, arguably fits the pattern.

Here in New Orleans, Mitchell has spent the mild February afternoon driving around with Mitchell Kulkin, a friend from the Radical Faeries whom he persuaded to be his decorator, angling for a dining table and chairs for his new house from the cavernous warehouse furniture dealers and consignment shops (his New York place never had room for any such thing). “Visiting?” person after person asks as he browses giant burled armoires, conspicuous in an ankle-length checkerboard skirt and a rainbow-trimmed hoodie. “No,” Mitchell says cheerfully. “I live here now.” He is joining a loose community that is coalescing. Jason Sellards—a.k.a. Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters—lives nearby. The lesbian burlesque duo Kitten N’ Lou are opening a sno-ball shop around the corner. Mitchell spent part of the afternoon texting with the singer Rickie Lee Jones, trying to persuade her to come to a screening that night (she demurred: Too much sex in Shortbus).

Before that, there was a visit with Lorraine Kirke, a new friend and fellow transplant (and mother of Jemima, Lola, and Domino). Kirke’s house, painted black and stuffed with battered finery, manifests a dusty bayou elegance that Mitchell appreciates, and she had offered to escort him to a local furniture shop to make an introduction. Before leaving, she gave him a copy of the coffee-table book she created on her “unapologetic interiors,” reading aloud a quote from Jemima, whose paintings hang on the walls: “She makes damaged goods feel at home.” “I mean, I do do a good brothel,” Kirke said as Mitchell and Kulkin enthused over her velvet couches, the front bedroom with a bathtub parked nearby.

“I bought this house about four years ago, and I just love it,” Kirke explained as we motored along to the shop. “We lived in the West Village. I really thought when I was in New York that I would never leave; there was no other place like it.” But then, she went on, “you just get to a point with New York, and it’s like …”

“Enough,” Mitchell said.

She turned to him. “Are there ghosts in your house?” she asked.

No known ghosts (and, by the end of the day, still no dining table), though Mitchell’s life has been pocked by loss, one of the many inevitabilities of getting older. He spent most of the pandemic working and still looks preternaturally, nearly Faustianly, youthful, but loss has trailed him all the same. “I’ve lost a lot of people in the last two years,” he says, including his mother, Joan, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2020 (his father died of the same cause seven years earlier); the Hedwig concert tour “Origin of Love” was undertaken, in part, to pay for his mother’s care. Through the Alzheimer’s, Mitchell and his mother found a relationship they had never had. “She looked at me in the last couple of years once and said, ‘You’re just a boy,’ ” he recalls. Casting a shadow still is the death of his most serious boyfriend, Jack Steeb, who had played bass in Cheater and in Hedwig’s backing band and died of his addictions in 2004. Mitchell still refers to him as “my boyfriend.”

Mitchell says he isn’t seeing anyone seriously now. “I’m picky because I’m older. You know, I’ve had my heart broken, so I’m not leaping. I’ll have sex once in a while, but, you know, dating is scary. Because I’ve lived long enough, and I also like things the way I like them. I don’t like the idea of being responsible for somebody else’s happiness. I’d like to be happy together. Moving out of town might actually be good for this,” he muses. “People have more patience in the smaller towns. Not rushing to the next thing.”

As the car speeds back toward home with Kulkin in the driver’s seat, Mitchell pulls on a joint from his backpack and turns contemplative. We’re on our way home to get ready for the evening’s screening of Shortbus, the Q&A to follow, and the DJ set he and Amber Martin will do in the movie theater’s on-site bar for a crew of local devotees—an odd bit of New York–iana (one attendee will remove their shoes and begin performing a sort of karate-inflected voguing) extracted from its place of origin and set, a little incongruously, in a glowing New Orleans shopping mall. One other ghost troubles him a little, one not yet gone but fighting cancer in a federal medical facility in North Carolina. “I do feel a little guilty that I have a house because of Joe, and he’s in jail,” Mitchell says.

“Send him a card!” Kulkin suggests brightly. “‘Thanks, Joe.’”