“And nothing can ever be the same”

“Rocky Horror” was the first crack that let the light in. A lot of darkness followed, but it lasted long enough for me to see.

It’s a sticky summer morning in upstate New York. A cafeteria at a gifted kid camp. Nerdy, precocious. A boy is showing me a photo of himself and some friends in costume — the boys in fishnet stockings, girls in corsets, everybody slathered in makeup — and I don’t know why I’m gripped by what I’m seeing. It feels like it’s against some kind of rule.

I’ve never worn makeup or fishnets, or a skirt. I’ve never asked myself why my earliest surviving memory is my mom painting my nails for me, at age three or four. Later summer I let a girl paint my fingernails in three different shades of blue. I love it at first, and then a week later I get freaked out and scrape it off myself.

After camp, I go home to Long Island and summer turns to fall. On a weekend sleepover night, my friend Ari pops “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the show those kids in the photo had performed, into the basement VHS. Ari is the coolest person we know. He’s a year older, openly bisexual, and he wears black nail polish and eyeliner and fishnets to school. He’s regularly beaten up for it.

The movie seems corny, but Ari knows this secret second script of jokes that work when he talks back to the screen at the exact right moments. (Him: “Where’s Santa Claus?” Movie: “…burning in the fireplace.”) But that’s nothing compared to the moment the mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter throws off his cloak and reveals a shimmering black corset, garters, huge fake pearls, and towering high-heeled boots.

Mid-1990s Long Island is stiflingly conformist. I don’t like boys, so I can’t be gay, but I get called “faggot” a lot because I don’t play lacrosse. I don’t fit in and I don’t know why. This movie seems like it’s beamed in from another dimension where even that word doesn’t sting.

Throughout high school, my friends and I gather in a basement and watch “Rocky Horror” every couple of months. Most nights, everyone is in costume as a character from the movie.

Everyone except me. I’m in costume as a boy.

You could write a long and boring and largely correct essay about the ways “Rocky Horror” is problematic–the language, the iffy attitude toward consent, the way Frank-N-Furter imposes his sexuality on everyone else, his eventual death, various things creator Richard O’Brien has said over the years, even though he’s long identified as transgender or third gender.

But thinking back to the movie for the first time since the death this week of Tim Curry, who played Frank-N-Furter, I see it’s smarter than I realized: the only characters whose gender and sexuality get mocked are the cis straight couple, Brad and Janet. They’re repressed, dull, painfully square. Their chaste relationship is played for laughs even before they meet a bunch of garishly costumed aliens from Planet Transsexual, as the movie is saying, “Can you believe some people choose to be like this?”

After one of those basement parties, I went online and started reading more about “Rocky Horror.” I read about the quasi-sequel called “Shock Treatment,” and a never-made sequel called “Revenge of the Old Queen.” I found fanfiction. Since I was little I’d been fascinated by stories of transformation, and soon I found the internet held thousands of stories where people changed their gender through magic, science, curses. Anything.

By then, I knew real people changed their gender with surgery and hormones, but I also understood how normal people felt about them: they were deluded, ridiculous, ugly, tormented, sex-crazed, suicidal or murderous. Frank is many of those things. The same internet searches eventually showed me the word “autogynephilia.”

I didn’t want to be those things. I didn’t want to be miserable. I wasn’t crazy, or flamboyant or fabulous, or even effeminate. I was pretty normal aside from… this. Isolated and silent, I concluded I was the only one of whatever I was.

Half an hour after Brad and Janet meet the aliens, those aliens seem mostly normal (today, their outfits and makeup seem more quaint than shocking), and, aside from Frank, harmless. This inversion is one reason people have loved this movie for 50 years now. Another is the magic of Tim Curry. Something about Frank-N-Furter jumps out of the screen. In a movie full of goofy one-note characters, he has actual soul. Life force. He’s unshakeably proud of himself–masculine and feminine, charismatic like a rock god, dominant one moment and coyly flirtatious the next.

Then there’s That Voice. He sounds like he sashayed into the movie off a classic Motown record. He sings about wanting to fuck the other characters, then looks down the camera like he wants to fuck you.

The most famous song from the movie is “The Time Warp,” long a staple of Halloween playlists.

Frank is introduced right after it ends, with a song called “Sweet Transvestite” about his own freaky greatness. That’s the one referenced in most of Curry’s obituaries. But later in the movie, after the ice axe murder, attempted cannibalism, sex, when most of the audience is a bit worn out from yelling and throwing stuff at the screen, “Rocky Horror” steps away from its story (which was already hanging by a thread) and something very different happens.

Now wearing a red corset and gold gloves, Frank drops the bravado and sings about a memory that could have belonged to any trans woman who ever lived: once, he saw a woman in a dress, and he found her so beautiful that he cried, because he knew instantly that wanted her dress, her beauty, for himself.

This scenario—seeing an actress and having a bolt of feminine longing strike you near-dead—is pretty common for trans women. When you strip out those particulars, to be trans is to want something you’re not being given and to realize you will never get it unless you go and claim it.

Frank is telling you he’s done it, and it’s glorious.

In the movie, we never get the faintest idea why aliens from planet Transsexual sent Frank to Earth, but you get the sense he’s abandoned his mission for a life of genderfucked debauchery because that feeling—being yourself, becoming what you had to be—is supreme.

That lust for life and that vulnerability makes Frank feel real, so it packs a punch when he sings “Don’t dream it, be it,” and the cast joins in, repeating those five words over and over, the words floating on gentle piano and strings, quietly reassuring you that it’s alright to be whatever you are. A community is waiting for you.

I wonder how many more times I heard “Don’t dream it, be it” before it sunk in. I thought they meant a community of fans in costumes. What other kind could there be?

Late at night, I kept reading. Both fiction and real-life stories about medical transition. Eventually I joined forums and talked to actual trans people about their lives. Convinced I was doing these things for the wrong reason, I always felt bad about it afterward, but I couldn’t stop.

The solution was obvious: Never tell anyone. The alternative was that no one would ever love me and I’d die alone. I stuck to that through relationships, marriage, until a few months before the birth of our first child. During an intimate conversation with my wife, I thought, “you should tell her, and if you don’t do it now, you probably never will.” I was nowhere near ready to consider that I might be trans, but she pointed out that I was obviously queer and owed it to myself to figure myself out.

That’s the thing about Frank-N-Furter. If he changes something in you, he also takes one thing away: Once you know, you can’t un-know.

Tim Curry was very aware of Frank’s legacy, of what the character had done for people who needed help understanding themselves when there were fewer paths to doing so.

“I’ve certainly had some very interesting and moving mail from people who’ve said, ‘Thanks for helping me figure out who I was,’ and that’s very nice,” he told NPR in 2005. In his 2025 memoir “Vagabond,” he wrote that he hoped his experiences meant something to lonely teens, and to “that older queen, hopefully still in his fishnets, who saw ‘Rocky Horror’ upstairs at the Royal Court.”

Many of Curry’s obituaries say, in these words or very nearly, “He never married and had no children.” Usually it’s a standalone paragraph, and for generations, this was actor obit code for “He was gay.” You can read similar phrasing in obituaries for his “Rocky Horror” costar Charles Gray.

In the last couple of days, clips of Curry being very charming and quipping about a romance with Miss Piggy on the set of “Muppet Treasure Island” have gone viral. A canny storyteller, he used that joke to deflect when interviewers asked about his love life. Even in his book, which he must have known was being published near the end of his life, he refused to talk about his relationships or sexuality.

In the United Kingdom, sex between men was illegal until Curry was in his twenties. “Rocky Horror” helped make him famous around the time the AIDS crisis was metastasizing to kill swaths of people (including his friend Freddie Mercury). When he was in his forties, a law called Section 28 banned “the promotion of homosexuality” in Britain.

All of which is to say it’s easy to see why a gay man of his generation might not choose to come out. Whatever he did, and whatever the reason, it was his to choose. He was younger than his “Amadeus” costar Ian MacKellen, who came out during a public debate surrounding Section 28.

Not long after he sings “Don’t dream it, be it,” Frank-N-Furter is shot dead by his jealous servant Riff-Raff. Even though Frank is shown to be a killer and arguably a rapist, the other characters react with disgust, confusion, or even grief.

The movie ends almost immediately afterward. Brad and Janet don’t know what they are anymore, but they know they’re not what they were when the night began. Neither was I. Even if it took me 30 years from that first viewing to hear what Frank was saying.

The world Tim Curry grew up in looks much like the world the global transphobic movement wants to send us back to: a world where art and stories by or about trans people are banned, where abusive parents are backed by the power of the state, where internet restrictions stop kids from finding community. It’s a world where more people will come to believe they’re freaks who don’t deserve love or acceptance.

I don’t think it’s possible to restore that world — not when I’ve met grade school-age trans kids and their loving parents, not when new kid-appropriate books about gender are published every year. But they’re trying.

To pull that off, I think they’d need a Time Warp. But the Time Warp is ours.

Reading remembrances of Tim Curry this week has driven home the fact that even when I thought I was horrifyingly alone, countless other people kept having the same experience I had.

“Rocky Horror” told me, again and again, that there was a community waiting for me if I took the plunge, crossed the line from “dream it” to “be it.”

It happened two years ago, which is still recently enough that I’m often astonished I ever did it. But I did. I came out as a trans woman. To myself. Family. Friends. Coworkers. A therapist. I found a community of trans strangers and some became dear friends. I grew my hair out, learned to do my nails, got my ears pierced, and started wearing dresses and skirts to work. I started HRT. Frank was right about how it was going to feel.

That was the thing “Rocky Horror” was trying to teach me, the thing I know now that I couldn’t imagine then: Becoming yourself is incredible. It’s art. It’s self-love. Self-creation.

It’s Sweet.