Thirty years ago, John Waters became one of the undisputed kings of underground cinema and an architect of the midnight movie with films like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. Pink Flamingos, in particular, became a standard bearer as 300-pound drag queen Divine, Waters’ muse, fought it out with Raymond and Connie Marble for the title of "filthiest person alive" in a depraved black comedy that included rape, human-poultry mating, a singing asshole, and an infamous ending in which Divine actually ingested dog droppings.

Over the years, Waters’ edge softened into the gentle, genial comedy of films like Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and Pecker. But now that the culture wars are heating up again with the current Washington administration declaring war on women’s breasts, shock jocks, and gay marriage, Waters returns with A Dirty Shame. This sex comedy—in which repressed convenience- store clerk Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) hits her head and becomes a sex addict to the delight of sexual healer Ray-Ray Perkins (Johnny Knoxville)—shares the sweet nature of Waters’ later comedies. But one look at the movie’s poster featuring actress Selma Blair wearing torpedo-sized prosthetic breasts makes it evident that A Dirty Shame also sports some of the outrageousness of Waters’ earliest comedies. The MPAA has rewarded Waters for his cheekiness by bestowing an NC-17 rating on the movie.

At 58, the filmmaker is now one of cinema’s elder statesmen, so much so that this latest comedy made its world premiere at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It was there that Waters sat down with "On Q" to talk about the movie, Bush Senior currying favor with Log Cabin Republicans, the marriage issue, and his brush with Elizabeth Taylor.

Q: How lucky are you to be putting out this movie with Selma Blair and those huge prosthetic breasts in the same year that the entire country has gone mad over a 10-second flash of Janet Jackson’s nipple?

John Waters: I didn’t think about it that way, since I thought this up before that news story happened. I guess I was sort of unaffected by that firestorm, because I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. I don’t even know what it is. Plus, I thought it was just another thing to make Europeans make fun of us.

Q: Did the NC-17 rating surprise you?

JW: It’s odd, because in America we accept pornography, but we don’t recognize NC-17. It’s a gray area that’s kind of confusing. Every mom-and-pop video shop has a porn section, yet parents are uptight about an NC-17 when you can look up porn on a website. To me, I don’t get it. This is a comedy, too. It’s not mean-spirited. There’s nothing against women—it’s a feminist tale, I think. It’s about women being serviced by mankind, at their own demands.

Q: Usually, it’s the man’s needs that come first.

JW: Johnny [Knoxville] is beyond needs, because he’s a sex saint. He’s just put here to help others. I had written at one point that he was always hard and always satisfied. That’s the back story—not that you ask. [Laughs]

Q: I know that you came up with the idea for this after reading that concussions can sometimes lead to hypersexualized feelings.

JW: Well, it’s a tiny percentage, like if you look at a bottle of pills and it says, like, "Side effects could include..." And you think, "Who would ever take these, because it causes dizziness, vomiting, nausea." It was something like that. A minority of head-injury sufferers lack the mental brakes, so if you acted on every sexual impulse that you had every day, ...it would be social anarchy. People would be like, "What! How dare you say that to me?" if there was a Tourette’s Syndrome of sex, which is kind of how I imagined that this would be.

Q: You’ve got an extensive catalogue of outre sexual practices in this. How long have you been collecting that kind of erotic trivia?

JW: Even since high school, I think, when I first read this book, Erotic Minorities. It was psychological, but where a doctor pleaded for understanding of these things. And I hadn’t heard of a lot of them, but then as years went on, everybody plays that game: "Do you know what this is?" It’s a juvenile, teenage thing to do. Then I saw some of them in sex clubs in New York before AIDS.

Q: There are a lot of bears in this movie, as well.

JW: Mostly only gay people know about bears. Almost no straight people know about bears. I was in San Francisco when Bear-quake was there, that’s when I got the idea. In Provincetown when I was there this summer, they have Bear Week, and I actually saw a T-shirt that said "Grrrr!" on it, which is in my movie! I made that up. I thought I had exaggerated it. You can’t think up things fast enough before they come true.

Did you know George Senior Bush and Barbara saw Hairspray on Broadway [during the Republican National Convention] and posed with Edna? That’s staggering, because that was on the list of something not recommended for Republican delegates to do.

Q: That was George Senior rebelling against Dubya.

JW: Maybe—I think they stayed [through the play] for the Log Cabin Republicans. But [Log Cabin] just came out and they’re not going to endorse Bush. I don’t know—it’s like "Jews for Hitler." It seems like, what are you, crazy? I guess if they’re fiscally conservative, but you know what? I don’t want to get married, ever, but couples that have been together, they should be able to, if they want to be that straight. But [the Log Cabin Republicans] seem like the ultimate traitors.

Q: And you can’t win. In the old days, it was people saying, "We don’t like queers, because they’re so promiscuous." And now it’s, "What do you mean, you want to get married and be as boring as the rest of us?"

JW: That’s true, but the sanctity of marriage where straight people can get married 10 times, where Britney Spears got married for an hour? Where’s the sanctity?

Q: Elizabeth Taylor.

JW: Well, see, they say they only marry the people they slept with. There is a generation where that is true. That could be true, she was married seven times, and I slept with more than seven people. Who am I to turn her into a ‘ho?

I went to her house and I met her, because she has an all-gay staff and they invited me to her cookout. She was lovely. She was Divinish, in a lovely way. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Like when Divine had parties, he always had hot dogs and junk food and candy, and so did she. And she just had a lovely way about her that Divine had—as a host, I’m talking about. I’m glad I met her. Of course, there were helicopters flying overhead, because it was the day after Princess Di died and she had a party anyway. So they were trying to get pictures. It was really like Apocalypse Now. I covered my bald spot, because I figured they were taking pictures straight down.

Q: Since A Dirty Shame is coming out with an NC-17, what are you hoping for?

JW: I hope it just makes no difference. It’s not even a real rating. It’s an American rating. And [the movie] is nonexplicit, too. Mostly, it’s ludicrous words [and the MPAA probably didn’t] even know what they meant. I would love to have seen them talking about, you know, what is "felching"? Did they actually have a discussion about that? We don’t say what it is in the movie. Did they go find out?