Most Americans first met John Waters on The Simpsons. His appearance in season eight as the owner of a kooky curio shop served as a barometer of sorts for American tolerance of homosexuality in the mid-1990s: Homer Simpson only comes, begrudgingly, to respect Waters’s character after he scares off a herd of irate reindeer with a horrifying Japanese Santa Claus robot from his personal tchotchke collection, saving the Simpson clan.
The episode, “Homer’s Phobia,” also served as a turning point of sorts for Waters in the cultural imaginary. Though he’d already made several Hollywood-financed films by 1997, including Hairspray, the idea that the Baltimore-bred B-list filmmaker might become a moderately reputable household name was laughable before the episode. Yet that’s precisely what’s happened in the quarter-century since: as Waters acknowledges in Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, “Somehow I became respectable.”
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